Four ambulance accidents in one month, only 4 of 9 work

Artemisa, October 4, 2017. Four accidents in a row occurred during september at Central de Ambulancias (Ambulance Center) in Artemisa, according to institution sources. This is due to the poor management of the center’s administration, which has hired inexperienced drivers that have been responsible for these accidents. All these events occurred as patients were being taken to hospitals in other municipalities, who have not only been burden with the weight of their ailments but to the added psychological trauma they have suffered after each incident which fortunately have not claimed any lives.

The Ambulance Center in Artemisa, the capital of the province of the same name, is presently facing a shortage of cars to tend to the high demand by ill patients, this has caused a series of problems that put people’s lives, many of them children, at risk. The population’s disappointment is widespread. Such is the case of some children with zika who last week were transferred to the nearby hospital in Guanajay, 12 kilometers away; their parents had to see to it on their own, because the physicians’ reply was that there was no ambulance, said Jorge Coto, the father of a two year-old girl sent to that hospital.

The Artemisa Ambulance Center has a vehicle fleet of nine cars, only five of which were working until these accidents began happening. Now, only four cars are working, because one of the damaged vehicles is not ready to run yet. Four cars for a population of 82,000 people. Nine did not solve the problem either.

The Defensoría del Pueblo (People’s Defense) demanded the Artemisa government authorities, in writing, to take the appropriate measures to prevent incidents of this nature, in a sector whose main function is to save human lives.

No administrative measures have been taken so far in that institution to prevent similar incidents from repeating.