A report by the Auditor-General (AG) shows that the poor quality of services rendered by the Emergency and Medical Services (EMS) can be attributed to a chronic shortage of staff and vehicles.
A report by the Auditor-General (AG) shows that the poor quality of services rendered by the Emergency and Medical Services (EMS) can be attributed to a chronic shortage of staff and vehicles.
An AG exception standard report for the financial year 2008/2009 reveals that the EMS in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro takes more than an hour to respond to calls due to a shortage of staff and vehicles.
Some vehicles couldn’t be verified by the AG as they were not available, while others were found to be unroadworthy.
“PE EMS is lagging behind from the national norms target of one ambulance for every 10 000 people”. The area covered by Nelson Mandela Bay EMS is Nelson Mandela Metro and the Cacadu District, which Grahamstown falls under.
These areas require 154 ambulances but they only have 72 available. “Upon inspection of the staff roster, it was noted that there are 35 staff members allocated per shift, but it was identified that only an average of 18 staff members are available on each shift.”
According to the AG, the management said the absent 17 members were on sick leave. It was also discovered that Fleet Africa, which provides vehicles to the EMS, does not adhere to the terms and conditions of the contract that requires it to replace all vehicles which have travelled 150 000km or are five years old.
In Grahamstown alone there are at least twelve vehicles which have travelled between 150 000 and 348 811km.
The report concludes that the “unroadworthy” vehicles that are used may result in down time or poor service delivery. “Upon the analyisis of the organogram and the list of vacant posts, it was identified that all administrative positions are vacant, therefore no staff are employed in administration.
All staff members that are performing administrative duties are employed as operational staff and as a result there are capacity problems.
“There is also a very high rate of vacant operational positions. Upon discussion with management they stated that appointment of staff is a provincial function, their directorate is fully informed of their situation but unfortunately the budget allocation is the biggest factor,” reads the report.
Nelson Mandela Bay EMS acting head Anslie du Plessis said posts will be filled soon but that appointment of staff is done by their provincial office.
He referred enquiries about unroadworthy vehicles to Fleet Africa whom he said is not replacing the vehicles.
Fleet Africa managing director Oupa Ramaswiela denied that they do not replace unroadworthy vehicles. He said that he is not aware of the AG’s report and therefore he could not comment on its contents.
“We have a contract with the [Health] department and we abide by its provisions,” he said, adding that that if they had not done so, their contract would have been terminated.
Du Plessis lamed he ongoing lack of radio communications at EMS on “vandalised” repeators and said that this is an issue which they have to attend to. He denied that vehicles could not be verified and argued that the 10 vehicles were out on call and could not be brought to the AG’s officials during the audit.
“We are trying to render a service using very limited resources,” he said. “The national norm for response time in an urban area is 15 minutes but PE EMS is far from meeting this criteria as only 32% of calls meet the requirement.
They took more than an hour to respond to an average of 300 calls per month. ” It was also discovered that during every shift, an average of 48% of staff take sick leave but that there are no reports indicating that the management is taking corrective measures to address the issue.
The report revealed a number of other issues including: unsigned invoices for receipt of medical supplies; unsigned shift lists; incomplete asset registers; no revenue collection procedure for transporting private patients and no checklist for the minimum equipment that each response vehicle should have been provided with.
