The National Ambulance Service is asking persons whose relatives are sick but are not in critical condition to make sure they secure a bed at a hospital before they place a call to the Service to transport their sick relative.

According to the Public Relations Officer of the Ghana Ambulance Service, Simon Yusif Kawula, this is to ensure that the patient is not stranded over lack of bed at the hospitals they are transported to.

“With non-emergency cases for instance when you have your relative at the Ridge Hospital and has been referred to Korle Bu, we’ll make sure that you the patient’s relative has done the necessary arrangement to be sure that should you take your sick relative to Korle Bu Teaching Hospital you’ll get a bed. Once you secure the bed then we move but if you don’t get the bed we’ll not come and pick your sick relative because if we do the patient will be stuck in the ambulance.

“Sometimes, the nurses in the hospital the patient is laying help with the necessary arrangement with the receiving hospital (referral hospital) to find a bed. Most of the time it is successful. But if that arrangement is not done it is difficult for us to move in because if we do the patient will be stuck in the ambulance,” Simon Yusif Kawula stated in an interview on Ghana Kasa on Kasapa/Agoo TV.

He also bemoaned the fact that some hospitals do not cooperate with the Service in handling emergency cases.

“Many hospitals don’t cooperate with us in some cases. Recently we picked a patient at Taifa to a certain hospital (I don’t want to mention the name of that particular hospital). We went to five different hospitals in Accra and they did not accept the case because they said they didn’t know any relatives of the patient.

It took our Operations Director to personally pay for the folder of the patient before the patient was admitted. Sometimes we pick a patient who’s in critical condition at the wayside because that person is a Ghanaian and pays tax we can leave anybody to die.

But when we take such cases to the hospital then it becomes our burden to find a place to lay the patient,”

Simon Yusif Kawula further called for effective collaboration between the Ghana Health Service, Mission Hospitals, and the National Ambulance Service to ensure that persons in critical condition are given urgent attention.

“I say this because sometimes we get to the hospital and we’re told that there’s no bed, the person has no relative around so will not be admitted then the responsibility becomes ours but we also don’t have a budget to take care of such people. A patient put on oxygen in an ambulance for a long time is a waste of resources and needs to be offloaded to a hospital.”