Why are hospitals needing to outsource their medical emergency response system?

From key differences between the medical transportation and emergency medical system to suggesting the outsourcing of such services in order to effectively serve patients in time of need, here’s all that you need to know.

Indian medical system has gone through ground-breaking developments over the years. However, there is one flaw in it which seems to increase the casualties – that is their emergency response system. In a lot of cases, it has been seen that due to faulty ambulances, delayed ambulances reaching the spot or the ambulances not having proper oxygen or other life-saving equipment, a lot of patients face difficulties.

Why are hospitals needing to outsource their medical emergency response system?

Speaking to HT Lifestyle, Dr. Navneet Singh, Group Medical Director, StanPlus said, “The reason is that most hospitals have their own ambulance aggregators, so, if a patient calls a hospital, the call is redirected to multiple attendants which results in an unnecessary delay. In addition to the delayed response time, the time is taken for to-and-from to the hospital also adds to the ETA and easily makes it 45 minutes on average. Having said that, we have to understand that a hospital's critical responsibility begins when a patient arrives, which is why healthcare facilities in India need to start outsourcing ambulance care to players like us that will help in reducing the response time, get all vital information to parallelly start first- aid response, thus helping in saving millions of precious lives that we lost due to inadequate infrastructure.”

Dr Navneet Singh further added that hospitals should outsource their emergency medical system as that is the feasible way to reduce casualties and save lives during the golden hour. Referring to the covid pandemic and the way medical system has taken lessons from it to improve their infrastructure and swiftness to improve their services, the doctor added, “The upkeep of ambulances, manpower, and equipment is a task that is more efficiently handled by a designated outsourced ambulance vendor rather than a hospital. The pandemic has led us to focus on improving healthcare infrastructure and also ambulatory care but it raises questions about why India fails to start treatment within the golden hour.” he also pointed out the key difference between medical transportation and emergency medical system. He said that the medical transportation is a system that will help in transporting the patient to the hospital. In most cases, these transportation services are devoid of proper infrastructure or equipment. However, emergency medical system consists of triaging, deciding the order of treatment, vital sharing, a comprehensive set of medical equipment, and trained manpower – serving as the ideal first response infrastructure.