Durban - In the future there will only be one emergency number to call for an ambulance and the procurement of medical equipment will be done by the national health department, Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi said on Thursday.
Motsoaledi made the comments ahead of the opening of the tenth general assembly of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, being held over four days at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre in Durban.
“We have just agreed with the newly appointed chief procurement officer in the National Treasury that we need him to be the one that orders equipment for all of our health care facilities in the whole country, rather than doing it province by province.”
He said preparations were already being made for the procurement of medical equipment, such as cancer radiotherapy machines, mammograms and various scanners to be centrally purchased.
Motsoaledi said that the days of ambulances being selective in which patients they picked up were numbered and that there would only be one number to call for an ambulance. The services of all ambulance services be they private or state, would only be allowed to be summoned by calling that one single number.
Not only that, every ambulance will have to have the same colours.
“When a human being calls for an ambulance, they must phone one number. The ambulance that is dispatched first must not come and demand money from the patient. They must save them [the patient] first and look for money later.”
He said that an application had been made with the Department of Communications for the emergency number.
He pointed out that his department was not against the private sector, but that it wanted the private sector to serve more people. He said that people failed to realise that state employees and contributions from the state to the private medical sector amount to R46 billion annually.
“We don’t want to destroy the private health care. That’s not what we want. We want it to be available to the whole nation.”
He said that currently the private health sector only services 16 percent of the country’s population.
African News Agency