Anybody who has been unfortunate enough to require a course of radiotherapy at Granada’s main hospital will know what an ordeal the ambulance route is, but at the same time, they are grateful for this free service.

However, with the cuts to the service and fewer ambulances catering for the same number of users, the roundabout routes and transfers from one ambulance to another means that patients spend more time travelling in an ambulance than actually at the hospital.

Things are set to get worse.

Ambulance drivers around the province are set to go on strike because the Junta has reduced the budget by 12.5%. This budget is shared out between the seven private companies that provide the ambulances. Between them they employ 250 workers and run a combined fleet of 130 ambulances.

The first strike is programmed for the first fortnight of next month. Meanwhile, on the 25th of this month, they will begin demonstrations in front of the provincial office of the regional health authority, SAS. “Today they informed me that the quarterly inspections will now be only once a year,” said the Secretary General of the sector, Jesús Zara, concluding, “It is obvious, therefore, that they will be reducing the quality of the service.”

According to one driver, they are stripping ambulances that are normally stationed at medical centres to provide urgent transfers. Consequently, when there is an emergency, they have to call an ambulance that could be on the other side of the city.

It is already foreseen that certain free services will disappear and a part-payment scheme introduced on non-urgent, patient ferrying services, other than for dialysis and cancer patients. So it is a question of sorting out who of the 855 patients that regularly use the service will have to contribute, and how much.

On average, the province’s ambulances carry out 31,700 non-urgent services – bear in mind that an ambulance with four on board counts as four services. The SAS pays around 12.6m euros a year in the province for emergency and scheduled ambulance trips and takes between 90 and 120 days to pay the ambulance companies once the service is provided. In other words, these companies are still waiting to be paid for services provided as far back as June.

(News: Province of Granada, Andalucia – Photo: Paco Ayala/photaki.com)