The Maltese ambulance service

Dr Michael Spiteri from the Accident and Emergency Department of St Luke's Hospital won a prize for the best presentation during the recently held Fifth Medical School Conference. The following is a summary of the presentation:

The objectives of the study were to establish a baseline of current provision of state ambulance service in Malta. A retrospective study of 2001, used to establish the distribution of ambulance workload across Malta, was carried out. A second part of the study included 100 calls taken at random during 2002-2003, which were studied into further detail to establish current performance levels.

The study shows that the heavy workload with which our service has to cope, is equally distributed across the months and days of the year, and is mainly localised around central Malta. Although the number of calls remains the same across different seasons, it was noted that the percentage of emergency calls increases during the summer months.

The study also shows that the service, which is being provided to the immediate surroundings of the hospital, is adequate. However, our emergency ambulances fail to meet an eight-minute target, call to response time, for most of the island. Most of these delays originate from within the hospital grounds itself, where a precious four minutes are lost in trying to set up a team to respond to an emergency. As a result, only 19% of emergency calls are answered on time.

This study highlights the urgent need of a pre-hospital care department, whose role would be that of designing a new ambulance system that is adequate to meet today's needs. One major challenge would be that of transforming the system into a well co-ordinated multi-centre dispatch one, which is run by adequately run personnel who are able to give urgent help to whoever needs it.