Karnataka's '108' ambulances to get faster, fitter & more efficient

The state’s ‘108’ Arogya Kavacha ambulance service which has been around for 13 years may soon be heading to the proverbial junkyard in its current form.

State health officials said they are in the process of revamping the Emergency Medical Service (EMS) to provide better aid by April.

“In the next two months, in my opinion, by the first week of April, there will be a new ‘108’ service,” according to Health Minister Dr K Sudhakar.

A 2020 report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) had highlighted the failings of the service.

From 2014-15 to 2018-19, the ambulances were not able to reach 50% of trauma cases in the critical “golden hour” period that would have saved lives.

“There were a lot of gaps in accountability and loopholes. Especially, in taluks, we had no means to assess the performance of the service or correct it,” said Sudhakar, attributing the problem to the service provider.

“We are now planning to implement a state-of-the-art ambulance service for which we have taken all preparatory steps. The objective is to dispatch ambulances to locations within 15 minutes of being summoned and the turnaround time will be one hour. The first golden hour is very crucial for the survivability of patients,” he added.

Health Commissioner D Randeep said the government will seek to have about 1,000 new ambulances in service, a yet-to-be-determined percentage of which will be advanced life system ambulances.

“The plan is to initially procure 750 ambulances, plus another 200 to replace 300 current ambulances, which are approaching the end stage,” he added.

Under the existing system, decisions to take a patient to a particular hospital are being taken by ambulance drivers (pilots), which is leading to poor patient outcomes.

“Hospitals in the state had not been mapped properly. We are now mapping them. In the new system, if a person has an orthopedic issue, a directive will be sent from our command centre to the ambulance to take the patient to the nearest orthopedic treatment hospital. The pilot will then have to take the patient to that centre alone,” Sudhakar said.

He noted that these new procedures are the result of extensive studies by the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Institute of Management and two separate additional chief secretary-level committees.

The health department had already outsourced the task of preparing a ‘request for proposal’ (RFP) to the Infrastructure Development Corporation (Karnataka) Limited (iDeCK).

“The document is now ready. In the next one week to 15 days, it may come before the cabinet. After it is passed by the cabinet, it will go for tendering,” the health minister said.

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