Emergency Medicine in SA

Been a pretty chill week so far. Did have one day of riding around in an ambulance on a 12 hour Emergency Medicine shift. As with every other gov service here, too few ambulances for too many people. The ambulance station (about 20 vehicles) in Mitchell’s Plain serves Kayelitsha and MP (total about 2 million people). In addition, they are plagued with inefficiency. Ambulance techs are underpaid and overworked, take much longer than usual to respond because 1) they cannot tell what is an urgent call and what isn’t – as a result they take a lot of bogus call by people who just want a ride to the hospital for routine stuff 2) Often they cannot even find the locations they are going to because roads and signs are crappy.

What this all results in is a painfully slow and quite inadequate public service. It further results in motivating people that can make a little money to buy private insurance, take private ambulances, to private hospitals and furthering the inequality gap.

Tuesday and Wednesday so far have been just as chill. Lots of hanging out with the host family, sleeping and just chilling out. I will go to the Langa clinic (in a formerly black township where HIV prevalances is 80 percent).