The Community Action through Motivation Programme (CAMP), the company operating the emergency 108 ambulance service in Uttarakhand, has claimed that the average response time of the ambulances has improved significantly in last four months. Incidentally, the company took over the operation of fleet of 108 ambulance service from GVK- EMRI Company in the last week of April month. Addressing media persons here on Saturday, the General Manager (GM)-Projects of the CAMP, Anil Sharma, said that the response time of the ambulances in April 2019 (when GVK EMRI was operating the fleet) was 43.24 minutes in rural and 35.07 minutes in Urban areas which improved to 38.46 minutes ( Rural) and 31.55 minutes (Urban) in May and further improved to 35.11 minutes (Rural) and 28.47 minutes (urban) in June. He claimed that in July, the response time in rural areas was recorded at 34.04 minutes and 27.08 minutes in rural and urban areas respectively. Sharma claimed that strategic positioning of ambulances, adoption of innovative measures like sms service for caller, ambulance monitoring through apps and use of GPS technology has helped in reducing response time of the fleet of 108 ambulances.
The company claims that a new procedure is set in place so that direct connect between the callers and the driver is established. In another measure, the service has decided to provide special Petro cards to the drivers so that the ambulances don’t face any operational problem due to absence of fuel.
Sharma said that the service served 26416 emergency cases between May 1 to 31 July out of which 9505 cases were related to pregnancies and 2139 with road accidents. Sharma added that a total of 137 births occurred in ambulances during this period. He said that the service has employed 725 workers and in appointments the company has given preference to locals. Sharma said that 98 percent of total staff is local.
The General Manager (operations) of the company Pradeep Rai said that the company is working on a project under which it is identifying the dark spots where more accidents are generally reported. “We have so far identified 120 such spots out of which 12 are in Dehradun. We would share the data with departments concerned so that effective mechanism is set in place to stop accidents,’’ he said.
The ambulance service has a fleet of 139 ambulances. Apart from these ambulances it also has one boat ambulance which is used to ferry patients across Tehri lake.
