THIS certainly is a 100 percent profitable business but it seems that the rent-a-car offices have not thought about before. If they did, they would have supported their car fleets with ambulance cars to earn more money. They would have also supplied the ambulance cars with medical cadres to meet the rising demand given the acute shortage of ambulance vehicles in the country. Scores of patients who are confined to hospitals and needed to be transported from one hospital to another usually face an embarrassing situation in this regard. How to find ambulance cars to transport them? Who is responsible for these cars: is it the hospitals or the Saudi Red Crescent? The problem is further aggravated by the attitude of the government and the private hospitals which both dismiss the responsibility for the ambulance services. The hospitals, to which the sick people will be referred, also maintain that they are only responsible for the patients after their arrival whether in ambulance or private cars. Here comes the dilemma of the families of the sick people. What will they do? How will they solve the transportation problem? Speculations and innovations will then have the dominance. Some families may think of taking their sick member out of the hospital to his/her home and then call the Saudi Red Crescent asking for an ambulance car to take the patients to another hospital. This is lot easier than asking for an ambulance car from a hospital to transport their sick members to another hospital!! The Red Crescent may refuse to do this job on the ground that the sick person who is to be transported from one hospital to another is the responsibility of either of the two hospitals. They will rightly say it is not the responsibility of the Red Crescent to transport patients between hospitals. I personally support the Red Crescent in this situation. Its specialty is to provide ambulance services to the sick people at times of need, emergency situations or accidents. Therefore I strongly believe that the ball is in the court of the Health Ministry especially that a number of the families of the patients usually tend to pay hospitals or clinics for the ambulance services. There are no rules or systems to regulate ambulance services. Can they be ordered from hospitals free of charge or should they only be provided by the Red Crescent? I may have the notion that this may be an illegal procedure since some hospitals and healthy centers will only have one ambulance car. Because of the shortage in the number of the ambulance cars, emergency cases in a hospital waiting to be transported to other more qualified hospitals may face real danger. It is sad that many of the concerned bodies have abandoned their responsibility of providing an ambulance cars. The Health Ministry can solve this problem by creating a unified chart containing all the rules and regulations governing the ambulance services, who is responsible and who is going to provide them? The ministry should block the road for the traders of ambulance services so that they should not exploit the patients or their families.
