Ambulance and Boundaries

I am not going to blame anybody until I get the facts right. In fact I am not going to blame any one, I just need enlightenment. Its not everyday that one calls the ambulance to one's home that one becomes an expert as to what to expect. The first time I called one was many years ago and everything went well. The ambulance arrived quite fast and my wife's nephew who is a dark skin fella forgave the personnel for talking Tamil to him.

My next experience with requesting for an ambulance service was on the day my brother died. My nephew, the son of arwah told me that he wanted to send his father to hospital again coz arwah didn't look good at all. He wanted to send arwah to the Kepala Batas hospital where he was hospitalised 2 days earlier.

He related how it was the first time he wanted to send arwah to the hospital. They called the relevant number and was answered quite promptly. They requested for an ambulance be sent coz they wanted to send arwah to the Kepala Batas hospital. When they gave their
address, there seemed to be a problem. They were told that the ambulance from Kepala Batas couldn't come to their house because they were living in the Bukit Mertajam District. The distance from their house to Kepala Batas is a little bit further than to Bukit Mertajam Hospital but Bukit Mertajam is notorious for her traffic crawl at anytime of the day.

They wanted to send arwah to Kepala Batas because they have friends working there so things could be made easier. It was suggested to them to take the patient to a few kilometres away into the boundary of Kepala Batas and the ambulance from Kepala Batas could service them. All this jurisdiction bullshit proved too much of a hassle so his children carried him into their car and drove him to Kepala Batas. Mind you, his condition was quite bad.

I have blogged about how stubborn arwah could be and he got discharged the next day night. The following morning on the day of his death, his condition was so bad that the children panicked and decided to send him to the hospital again. This time he couldn't be carried coz he really needed medical care if he were to be moved. Since he was previously warded into Kepala Batas Hospital, they wanted to take him there again but had to call for an ambulance to take him to the Bukit Mertajam Hospital first. Their plan was to transfer him to Kepala Batas from the Bukit Mertajam Hospital. He died en route to the Bukit Mertajam Hospital.

I do not blame the ambulance personnel for his death for they arrived very promptly and were good at their work. He was fated to die that day so he died that day. I accept that. What puzzles me is this boundary thing. Since when did they start to have boundaries and that no ambulance from one district could cross into another district to carry patients. Why is there a prize for the most number of patients ferried by each district or cost constraints or like someone said because of the privatisation of ambulance services?

I am in the dark about this. Is the ambulance service really privatised. Like in the case of where the shorter route may not be the faster route, and the sick is really sick, how do we plead for them to understand our predicament?

Anyone out there care to enlighten me a bit?