Yogi govt to rope in private ambulances to ferry patients and save lives

To make ambulance services more accessible to the masses, the state government is going to rope private ambulances into their fleet shortly. Once it is done, the ambulance service would be functional like an Ola or Uber transport service.

Lucknow:To make ambulance service more accessible to the masses, the state government is going to rope in private ambulances into their fleet shortly. Once it is done, the ambulance service would be functional like an Ola or Uber transport service. A user or caller would get ambulance from nearby available location. With this, the probability of death due to lack of transportation would come down. Besides, the UP government will pay the private ambulance or service providers.

In a bid to reduce ambulance response time, the Yogi Adityanath's government has constituted a committee comprised of SGPGI, and KGMU Lohia institution doctors. The committee has been asked to make policy on how to improve health services in the state.

Talking to the media, the committee member Dr. PK Das said, "With the state having a vast population, providing ambulance service to everyone has become a big challenge. Although govt has procured ambulances but is not sufficient to match the demand. Despite spending crores, a chunk of the budget is going into replacing old ones with new ambulances but not expanding the fleet. To address this issue, we are planning to rope in private ambulances to reach out to people. Thereafter, it will work like Ola or Uber service. The private ambulances have to appoint staff as per government norms. These ambulances will be deployed at different locations to make them available for people who need them, while the government will pay them on a per-patient basis.

Presently, the state is having three kinds of ambulance services- First is 108 ambulance services, which is having 2200 vehicles and ferries 9500 patients per day. Second is 102 service, which is having 2270 vehicles and ferries 9500 including pregnant along with mothers and newborns after delivery on a daily basis. The third ambulance service has a ventilator, under which 250 ambulances work in all 75 districts and ferries around 500 patients every day. Incidentally, all these ambulance services function under PPP mode.

In a bid to increase the ambulance number in its fleet, the health department had been asked to procure 812 new ambulances in the next 100 days. Now, these ambulances are ready at workshops. State government would flag off these ambulance shortly. With these inductions, ambulance numbers would cross 5000 figures and more and more patients would be served.