Public complaints about the slow response times from ambulances are not new and the heart-wrenching account of the incident by Mr Sitahal’s widow should evoke an immediate response from Health Minister Terrance Deyalsingh and all other stakeholders—not just those directly linked to the ambulance services but every level of the country’s emergency response system.
On Tuesday, a pedestrian collapsed on a city street. People walked by, police officers looked on, no one responded to the frantic cries for help from the man’s wife and 45 minutes elapsed before the man was taken to a nearby hospital where he died.
The circumstances which led to the death of 63-year-old amputee Keith Sitahal were not only tragic but highlight yet another of the failings in T&T’s public health system.
That an ailing citizen could collapse on a street in the centre of San Fernando and remain there for the better part of an hour is an indictment of the country’s medical emergency services which have been operating well below par for a considerable length of time.
Public complaints about the slow response times from ambulances are not new and the heart-wrenching account of the incident by Mr Sitahal’s widow should evoke an immediate response from Health Minister Terrance Deyalsingh and all other stakeholders—not just those directly linked to the ambulance services but every level of the country’s emergency response system.
An autopsy done on Wednesday showed that Mr Sitahal died of a heart attack.
According to the American Heart Association, brain death and permanent death start to occur in 4–6 minutes after someone experiences cardiac arrest but conditions can be reversible if the patient is treated within a few minutes.
Mr Sitahal was left unattended on the pavement for 45 minutes and his chances of survival were reduced by seven per cent to 10 per cent every minute that he was left there without any type of life support intervention. Medical data shows that few attempts at resuscitation succeed after 10 minutes.
Best practice in the US for medical emergencies is a turnout time of one minute, and four minutes or less for the arrival of a first responder—an objective that has to be met 90 per cent of the time.
In Tuesday’s case, it is not known if or when an ambulance was ever dispatched since it was a vehicle from San Fernando’s Disaster Management Unit (DMU), summoned by Mayor Kazim Hosein, that eventually transported Mr Sitahal to hospital for medical treatment, that was administered much too late to save his life.
Following a recent public hue and cry over the slow response time by an ambulance, there were disturbing revelations about an inefficient system of dispatch and response, with ambulances and their crews often parked up at hospitals waiting to properly hand over patients at Accident and Emergency departments.
There are also reports of not enough vehicles or trained paramedics to respond in a timely fashion to emergency calls.
That this should be the state of affairs in T&T, a country which boasts of a certain level of development, is unacceptable.
The health authorities must act urgently to accelerate dispatch and response times.
A matter of minutes can be the difference in life or death, particularly in the most urgent of medical emergencies, such as heart attacks and profuse bleeding.
Nothing can be said or done now to ease the pain and despair of Mr Sitahal’s widow and his loved ones.
However, every effort must be made to ensure that this type of avoidable medical tragedy never happens again.