The Health Minister has indicated that the parked ambulances at the forecourt of Parliament will hit the road on January 28th, 2020.
Honourable Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, Minister of Health, in an interview said; “on the 28th of this month [January] President [Nana Akufo-Addo] will commission the entire policy…that is the first step in improving ambulance service.
He went on to add that, “you’ll see us driving these ambulances around.”
Over 300 ambulances have been purchased by the government in fulfilment of a campaign promise to meet the healthcare needs of the people, with adequate and efficient emergency response team.
The said ambulances have been at the forecut of parliament for a while and the government says, their inability to distribute them was due to the absence of salient features like tracking devices on the ambulances.
An earlier date, January 6, 2020, was scheduled to have the ambulances commissioned by the president, but this was postponed on the advice of the Chief Executive Officer of the National Ambulance Service, Prof Ahmed Nuhu Zakaria.
Prof Zakaria made this suggestion, stating the fact that factors like the training of personnel for the advanced equipment which came with the new ambulances was not complete.
He cautioned saying; “We don’t want a situation where you do the commissioning and then still wait to get all the processes completed before the vehicles can be dispatched into the various constituencies.”
