‘Militarising services may not protect medics’

HEALTH MEC Nomafrench Mbombo has warned against militarising ambulances in a bid to safeguard paramedics, saying such efforts will only make them bigger targets.

Mbombo was speaking alongside a team of department heads in the Emergency Medical Services briefing the standing committee on community development on the attacks on medics.

Attacks on EMS officials in the province have become frequent, with some35 incidents reported in six months.

According to a report conducted by the Department of Health on assault of staff, attacks mostly happened on the weekends between midnight and 3am.

As a precautionary measure, certain areas had been categorised as “red-zones” due to previous attacks on either medics or police officers.

These areas included Philippi, Nyanga, New Cross Roads, Gugulethu, Tafelsig in Mitchells Plain, Heideveld, Site C and Mandela Park in Khayelitsha as well as Kalksteenfontein and Hanover Park.

Mbombo said the classification of red-zone areas regularly changed based on the number of incidents.

The team highlighted ideas that had been thought of to help safeguard medics, including bulletproof vests, bulletproof ambulances, cameras on board ambulances, panic buttons on uniforms and armed escorts.

But Mbombo told the committee that the issue around safeguarding emergency personnel was one that needed co-operation from all sectors and caution against

Many trained medics leaving the Western Cape in fear of the attacks

militarising the health-care profession.

“Health professionals are to render services, when you start militarising or securitising the health service you have do to it very carefully, like having a security personnel inside the ambulance, it goes beyond the notion of medicine,” she said.

“When we have to go that route, we need to make sure it does not impact the profession itself.”

Head of the EMS in the province Dr Shaheem de Vries said last year alone there were about 50 medics who were booked off for post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of attacks on staff members.

De Vries said as a result many trained medics were leaving the Western Cape in fear of the ongoing attacks. He said the added measure of police escorts placed a strain on the waiting time for an ambulance and also put a strain on police resources.

“This is a cancerous growth and continues to grow worse and worse. It is our biggest challenge, we used to worry about response times but now we worry about the staff,” he said.

“My biggest fear is that I will wake up at night with an SMS that one of my staff has been shot and when that happens they will all down tools, there is no intervention in place to stop that, it will ground to a halt. And when that happens everyone will suffer, not just in the red-zones.

“We serve about 550 000 patients every year, half of them are in the city, that’s approximately 1 500 patients a day and so when it happens, my staff will not just withdraw for a day or two, it will be a week or even a month.

“It is a massive challenge and I am completely overwhelmed on how to deal with this. I had staff asking me for bulletproof vests and that is like adding bulletproof vests to a vending machine because all that will happen is that in gun-driven Cape Town, they will get you for that bulletproof vest.”

“But now when I tell them I can’t put bulletproof vests in ambulances they think it is a money issue or that I don’t care.

“We tell our staff not to carry weapons but we know some of them carry them but it is not our policy.”