NE NEWS SERVICE
CHENNAI, FEB 21
Callers to 108 will soon be able to track the movement of ambulances on their phones, akin to call taxi aggregators and food delivery services, State Health and Family Welfare Minister C Vijaya Baskar told the assembly on Thursday.
The callers, however, will have to call from the Avarasam 108 app to avail this facility.
While this app is likely to reassure the callers about help, it will also prevent or reduce the amount of prank calls the service has been receiving, experts said. Besides being a waste time and resources, high number of ineffective calls can potentially put lives in danger – someone may be in genuine need of help while emergency services personnel are occupied attending such calls.
According to the performance data of the emergency service, only two of every five calls the call centre in Teynampet receives are for medical emergency. Of these calls, nearly one in five is a repeat call to ask the control room if help is on the way or how long it will take for help to arrive.
“Letting people track the ambulance that has been assigned to them will help them keep calm. It will also reduce the number of repeat calls the centre receives,” said GVK-EMRI state head M Selva Kumar.
Until now, Avasaram 108 app was only able to detect the location of the caller. Although launched in 2017, less than 5% of the calls the call centre receives are from this app. Most people did not download the app as they had very little information through it.
“Now that they can see the ambulance movement, we are hoping more people will download it,” Selva Kumar said.
The minister was replying to a complaint raised by the Ottapidaram DMK legislator C Shunmugaiah that ambulances take at least one hour to reach the spot. “Recently, a person from Ottanatham village called me for some medical help. I called
- Later, we received a call from the driver. He said he was in Tirunelveli and it would take him at least an hour to reach the spot,” he said. He said there we were only two ambulances near his constituency. “Many times they are sent to Tuticorin or Tirunelveli. Services to our villages are delayed,” he said.
Vijaya Baskar said the average response time for an ambulance is eight minutes within Chennai and around 10 minutes in other urban areas.
“The time differs in other areas. But our ambulances never take one hour to reach anywhere,” he said. The state will place another ambulance in the constituency, he said.
