The GVK-Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI) ‘108’ Ambulance Service will replace 116 old ambulances in its fleet in Tamil Nadu by the end of May. The State Government has already purchased and fabricated these ambulances.
B. Prabhudoss, head of marketing and hospital relations, GVK EMRI, told The Hindu that the emergency service had begun identifying ambulances that are no longer fully efficient.
This included 16 ambulances in the Coimbatore Region, which comprised three districts. While Coimbatore will be getting seven new ambulances, Tirupur would be getting eight, and the Nilgiris one.
This step has been taken up to maximise the efficiency of the service and reduce the response time of the emergency service, which attended nearly 76,000 emergencies every month in Tamil Nadu including around 3,000 in Coimbatore alone.
The 108 Ambulance Service now had an average response time of 10 to 12 minutes in urban areas and between 10 and 20 minutes for rural areas in Tamil Nadu. It was working closely with the Tamil Nadu Health Systems Project (TNHSP) and the State Health Department to increase coverage and ensure more people are benefitted from the ambulance service.
“We are now in the process of implementing an Automated Vehicle Location Tracker that would direct the call centre operator to the ambulance nearest to the location of the incident. We are putting GPS in all vehicles,” he said.
Further, the 108 service was also trying to improve efficiency by cutting down on the turn-around time from hospitals. Tamil Nadu was also the only State where the 108 Service had introduced non-pneumatic anti-shock garment, a first-aid device to prevent maternal deaths due to obstetrical haemorrhage (heavy bleeding of a woman during or shortly after a pregnancy), he said.
The GVK-EMRI had a total of 703 ambulances in Tamil Nadu, including 27 ambulances in Coimbatore. Of these, nearly 37 were neo-natal ambulances designed specifically for pregnancy-related cases. As much as 29 more neo-natal ambulances are going to be inducted in Tamil Nadu soon. The ambulance service is present in 15 States and 2 Union Territories covering a total population of nearly 750 million.
