Ambulance Service To Introduce Helicopter In Emergency Response

The Ghana National Ambulance Service, although heavily under-resourced, says it is considering introducing air transport in its emergency services. The Ghana National Ambulance Service (GNAS) has since its inception in 2004 migrated from Seven Stations in three regions to One Hundred and Fourteen stations. It has presence in every region in Ghana and two control rooms in Accra and Kumasi. The GNAS is mandated to attend to distress calls and rush victims of life threatening emergencies to the nearest health facilities. It is supposed to be equipped to offer premedical life saving care to patients before getting to the referral facilities. The service is however under resourced; a situation authorities there say is affecting service delivery due to lack of funding to secure the needed ambulances and other logistics. It currently has 161 ambulances serving the 25million Ghanaians across the country with 26 of them undergoing maintenance. Regardless of this deficiency, the service says it has ambitions to secure airborne ambulance services to compliment its rapid response efforts. Speaking on Ultimate Radio, its Public Relations Officer, Simon Yusuf Kewura indicated that air transport was now the priority of the GNAS. �Air transport is our priority and currently we are lobbying government to get us at least one helicopter,� he stated. Mr. Yusuf Kewura explained that potential accidents that could occur at the nation�s off shore oil exploration sites as well as their objective to reduce their response time to restrictive accident scenes, informed their aim to introduce air ambulance services in their operations. He divulged that a private organization is already in talks with the management of the GNAS to set up its air transport services in Ghana. He added however that the services of this organization would come at a cost and thus could be the preserve of the affluent to the detriment of low income earners. According to the PRO, the service is looking at riding on the back of its tenth anniversary in August this year, to raise funds to support its activities.