Barbados Nation ( Barbados )
26 January 2023 ( Page 14 )
Urgent Care ambulance for public soon
WITHIN THE NEXT MONTH Urgent Care Barbados will launch an ambulance service for public use.
Giving his remarks at a ribbon cutting ceremony Monday night for a new state-of-the art medical centre at the Estates in Boarded Hall, St George, co-founder and managing director of Urgent Care Barbados Inc. Dr Bandele Majeks said the new service and facility would provide quality health care to the wider public.
He told the DAILY NATION that the upcoming ambulance service would be used to transport critical emergency cases to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) or the Estates based medical facility.
“We’ll bring patients who require treatment at the facility to the Estates by the ambulance as well and that service is going to be available to the entire island,” he said.
Majeks said that problems with the current ambulance services still existed. He said the service often tended to be overwhelmed by the number of requests and it was also difficult for persons to access care during late-night hours.
“We find that after a certain time, typically in the later hours of the night, the access to ambulance services, especially on the private side, becomes a little bit unreliable. So what we want to do is to essentially complement what’s currently there, and certainly ensure that patients of Urgent Care Mobile and the wider population have greater access to these types of services,” he said.
Depending on how well the service was received, Majeks said that consideration would be given to expanding the fleet in the future.
“I think that we’re starting with one (ambulance) to try to make sure that it’s fully operational and running smoothly. Then we’ll certainly give it some consideration if we’ll expand those services with another ambulance or two,” he said.
The facility will also be one of the few in the island capable of delivering timely treatment of heart attacks by offering critical clot busting medication. Majeks said that those medications had only been offered at the QEH, however, with the Memorandum of Understanding in place, the medical centre would
be able to deliver care to suspected cases.
(JK) /
Co-founder and managing director at Urgent Care Dr Bandele Majeks
(left) standing with co-founder of Urgent Care Dr Makeba Brooks
(centre) and director of strategic projects, Sagicor Life Inc Edward Clarke at the launch of Urgent Care
Medical Centre. (Picture by Jamar Knight.)