“My husband has been stabbed on the left side of his chest, please hurry and come help me,” a distressed Gloria Snyman said to an emergency services employee on the other end of her 10111 call on June 24 in Sophiatown.
“The operator just asked me what had happened, where we were, my husband’s name and said help was on the way – no one told me what to do or how I could have helped him,” Gloria retold.
“The operator was very calm but had no sense of urgency.”
Gloria said Shahied Snyman’s hands started turning blue, prompting the neighbours to help transport him to the hospital.
“Gloria came to us for help and my partner took Shahied all the way to Helen Joseph, spent a couple of minutes with him there and came back,” resident Tilly Michaels recounted.
Michaels’ partner found the ambulance at the house when he came back from the hospital.
Shahied died that day.
Same story across the city
An ambulance was called to Windsor West at 12:47pm but only arrived at 14:40pm on 27 June. Three calls had been made and a man was in agony and who was stabbed in the head shook as his body went into shock.
Follow protocol
“Such a situation will never happen if the caller called the correct toll free number for emergency services which is 10177 or 112 on the cell phone,” Emergency Medical Services spokesperson Robert Mulaudzi said.
The protocol to be followed when an emergency call is placed is asking the caller’s name, address of the caller, contact number of the caller, what the emergency is, the nearest landmark if the area does not have a street address and advise the caller on what to do while they wait for an ambulance to arrive, Mulaudzi explained.
You’ll wait an hour for an ambulance
He made it clear that the estimated time for a call to be logged on the system by the call taker and be sent to a dispatcher – who will then dispatch available vehicle – will reasonably be half an hour and it should take between 15 and 30 minutes for an available unit to be despatched, depart and arrive on scene. That process should take at least an hour.
Mulaudzi further says it is impossible for a call to be lost in the system because it would have been recorded to the emergency call centre.
*Do you think the Emergency Medical services take long to respond to emergency situations?
