Nepals nystartede ambulance service er meget mangelfuld med hensyn til uddannet personale. Kun 2-3 hospitaler i områder, der er særligt udsat for naturkatastrofer, har uddannede paramediciner i deres personale.
BANGKOK, 10 September 2012 (IRIN): The Nepal Red Cross Society (NRCS), the country’s largest NGO, has 168 ambulances but none have trained paramedics, and only 35 percent of ambulance drivers have had first aid training.
“The ambulance service in Nepal is very poor,” Rajesh Gongal, dean of Patan Hospital and president of NAS, told IRIN.
Most vehicles that operate as ambulances in Nepal are privately owned cars completely unsuitable for medical treatment and lacking effective communications equipment, says NAS.
Kathmandu, with almost two million inhabitants, has just 21 officially registered ambulances, government figures show, most of which are owned by NGOs and community-based organizations.
Patients are dying on the way to hospital because of the lack of trained paramedics, said paramedic and NAS employee Umesh Prasad Sah.
“Nepal’s ambulance service cannot even handle a small-scale natural disaster, much less a major earthquake like the one predicted for the Kathmandu Valley,” said Amod Dixit, general secretary of the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), one of the country’s leading experts on disaster preparedness.
“In the absence of proper primary care and transportation, patients often travel long distances, causing undue delays in obtaining proper medical treatment,” explained Ram Shah, head of department at the Orthopaedic and Trauma Surgery in the Nepal Medical College Teaching Hospital.
He said current levels of training and services were “inadequate”.
“Pre-hospital care is [a] very important aspect of all trauma care and there is evidence that if you can get professional help within a certain period of time then the number of injuries and deaths can actually be reduced,” said NAS’s Gongal.
