“Your duty does not end in the ambulance, sometimes your ambulance is even well equipped than the health facilities that you send patients to, you have to assist the nurses and doctors in the treatment, as your objective is to save a life,” Prof.  Ahmed Nuhu Zakariah, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of NAS, stated.

He was speaking at the opening of a two-day training workshop for EMTs in the Northern Sector on Oxygen Therapy for critically ill COVID-19 patients.

The programme was sponsored by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Department of Health and Social Care of United Kingdom (UK).

Among the topics treated were management of severe  and critically ill COVID patients, adequate and inadequate breathing, oxygen therapy, oxygen titration and different oxygen delivery services, positive pressure ventilation, big-wave mask and portable transport ventilator and airway management and use of supraglottic airway devices.

The CEO pointed out that soon paramedic training programme would be rolled out for all of the EMTs to benefit, stressing that the government was committed to improving the emergency services system in the country and that “you have a role to play to save lives”.

Prof.  Zakariah commended the WHO and UK Department of Health and Social Care for the training “because anytime there is training to add knowledge, we know that  the public are safe, if you do not have the knowledge the patient’s health would be worsened”.

He noted there had been some success thanks to the one constituency-one ambulance policy of government  “we have scaled up the emergency services to all constituencies in the country”.

The EMTs system, he said, had come so far, adding that there were now over 3,000 personnel, starting with only 63, with 297 stations countrywide.

He urged them not to allow challenges to overwhelm them, but be focused on saving life of the people.

Dr Dominic Awariyah, Ashanti Regional Coordinator, NAS was full of praise for the government for the timely distribution of ambulances that helped in the transportation of COVID patients to the hospitals to save their lives.

He appealed to officers to do well in maintaining the ambulances “just as you handle your own cars”.