By Nicholas Osei-Wusu
The National Ambulance Service is calling for urgent punitive sanctions against people hijacking and abusing the National Emergency Telephone Lines for no cogent reasons, in the face of an overwhelming increasing number of prank calls.
According to National Security Data on the use of Emergency Toll Free Telephones, more than 20 million prank calls were received between 2020 and 2022, with the National Ambulance Service alone receiving 37 million such irrelevant calls in 2022 alone, impeding people from genuinely accessing the service or affecting the Ambulance Service’s response time to real emergency situations.
The Director of Operations of the National Ambulance, Dr. Foster Ansong, disclosed this to the media at Kenyase in the Kwabre East Municipality of Ashanti on the sidelines of a training programme in Basic Life Support.
The workshop was participated by health professionals and some students of the Garden City University College with resource persons from State and Private organizations which responsibilities relate to life and healthcare. The resource persons from the National Ambulance Service took the participants through theoretical and practical basic life-saving skills to enable the participants to improve upon professional competencies and care not only at their respective places of work but, anywhere emergency care is needed.
They were as well educated in good customer care as one of the most important but often disregarded psychological and emotional health needs of healthcare seekers.
The training programme was jointly organized by Elijeko Foundation, a non-for-profit organization involved in health promotion in West Africa, the National Ambulance Service and National Blood Bank. Founder of Elijeko, Andrews Nyantakyi, explained that, insufficient number of people with skills in basic lifesaving in emergency situations is contributing to ”the high number of preventable deaths and morbidity at home, workplace and in public spaces hence the need for more skilled people to prevent needless deaths”.
An Emergency Medicine Specialist at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Dr. Joseph Bonney, like the case of fire safety, the state needs to be urgently considered a policy on First Aid and public education starting from the basic school level.
The Director of Operations at the National Ambulance Service, Dr. Foster Ansong, lamented that, despite the commitment of the Service to provide timely intervention to save lives in emergency situations, it is faced with the most serious external difficulties including overwhelming number of prank calls.
According to him, while the Service received and attended to 110 thousand real emergency situations between 2020 and 2022, prank calls alone numbered three point-seven million.
Dr. Ansong said, for this serious challenge of prank calls to stop the government must take measures against such persons now that the personal identities of callers could be easily detected.