Romanian Ambulance Service Ignorance Results In Fatality

“Yesterday evening I received a telephone call from the patient’s family. I was told that the woman was suffocating and that she requested an ambulance with a doctor, receiving the answer that there is no doctor in the Ambulance Service at the moment. This situation represents a major emergency. I learned that the doctor on duty left before his replacement arrived, saying that he is a commuter,” said Thursday, in a press conference, Raed Arafat, deputy secretary of state for emergency medical assistance within the Romanian Ministry of Public Health.

Arafat said that the doctor entering duty sent a nurse to handle a zero degree emergency. The nurse was supposed to bring the woman to the hospital, but she did not have any medical equipment. “She left empty-handed towards a woman who was suffocating, and she did not have any resuscitating equipment in the car. Moreover, she was not able to tell me how resuscitation is performed, namely cardiac massage and ventilation. Moreover, the doctor was two minutes away from the location where the ambulance was called,” Arafat added.

"The family called the ambulance three times in 20 minutes, and the ambulance dispatcher yelled at the family,” Arafat said.

Aside from this, the car sent on location was a transport vehicle, without defibrillator, while in the Ambulance Service motor pool there were cars equipped for emergency intervention, but the keys to one of them were with the driver who was off duty, while the other ambulance was only used by a certain driver, who was not at work.

The patient went into cardiac arrest soon after the nurse arrived. The nurse did not know what the resuscitation procedures are and she said that she was not supposed to resuscitate a patient since she was there only to perform transportation,” Arafat added.

The deputy secretary of state went to Giurgiu, Wednesday evening, accompanied by local authorities. A control revealed serious violations of the rules, including obsolete equipment.

Harsh sanctions were issued, including the dismissal of the Ambulance Service chief, salary cuts for a period of three months and warnings.

Romanian health minister Eugen Nicolaescu said that other controls were performed at ambulance services.

“Now I understand why people die in the interval between the call to the ambulance and the arrival of help on location. To avoid such situations, we have decided to standardize emergency medicine, namely to impose some very clear rules that need to be observed. This is, if you will, a militarization of the professional act,” the minister concluded.