Ambulance...Life Saver or Life Taker ? In Dubai a Life Taker!

"...the ambulance arrived thirty-five minutes after the call had been made. It was too late; the boy had already lost his life..."

Last week one of our readers neighbor’s eleven-month old crawler choked on a clove of garlic that he picked up from the kitchen floor as his mother was busy cooking. The first-aid trained mum first dialed for an ambulance and then thumped the boy as she tried her best to expel the garlic from his windpipe. Unfortunately, the ambulance arrived thirty-five minutes after the call had been made. It was too late; the boy had already lost his life.

Another lady had to experience a similar loss due to the inefficiency of medical services in Dubai. She had a nasty fall on a slippery bathroom floor and called the ambulance as she was unable to move and could not walk to a cab. When the ambulance arrive an hour and a half later, the woman had already lost her baby due to excessive bleeding.

While Dubai boasts of the world’s tallest tower, world’s biggest hotel, biggest mall, fastest cars, it has the slowest ambulances. ’Our slow information system is to blame,’ says the manager at a renowned hospital in Dubai. ‘When we get a call, we start locating our vehicles and contacting the drivers and the paramedics and at least ten minutes lapse doing just that,’ she says, which is a considerable amount of time in a state of emergency. One lady who called up a government hospital was flatly refused. ‘The staff member who took the call said they cannot send an ambulance as the bed space is overcrowded.’ While its busy making the ’biggest’ of everything in its bid to be a global phenomenon, it’s time Dubai started thinking of the biggest and best emergency services too before so many more lives are lost.

Posted in: Dubai Ambulance Death Slow Old