A decade after its launch, the 108-Emergency Medical Ambulance Service (EMAS) has managed to achieve a response time of less than 20 minutes to reach out the people in need of instant medical attention, with the response time recorded lower than the national average and one of the lowest in the country.

The EMAS, launched by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik in 2013, has been a lifeline for the people of Odisha. The service has substantially improved emergency healthcare services for the 4.5 crore people of the State, claimed a senior official of the State’s health department on Monday.

It was a challenge to improve the efficiency of the fleet and bring down the response time from 30 minutes to 20 minutes. However, several measures were adopted to meet the challenge by upgrading the fleet, resulting in the improvement of its performance.

Between October 2019 and March 2020, all 420 existing ambulances in the 108 fleet were replaced with new ambulances. Replacement of old ambulances were undertaken to reduce the travel time and vehicle breakdown, as both had negative impact on the response time and capacity of ambulance to attend cases, the official added

Subsequently in January 2021, 84 new Ambulances were added to the existing fleet of Ambulances. These Ambulances were provided out of the State budget to meet the increase in demand for InterFacility Transfers, to reduce cancellation of service requests for ambulances, and to bring parity in area of coverage of ambulances across districts.

In 2020-21, when the COVID Pandemic was sweeping the nation, there was a requirement for more Advanced Life Support (ALS) ambulances to handle patients with serious respiratory ailments. Hence, 28 New ALS ambulances were added to the fleet in April 2021 for providing service to patients of serious respiratory ailment during the period.

Subsequently, with a view to strengthen the ambulance fleet so as to meet any future eventuality, the State took a decision to upgrade 299 Basic Life Support (BLS) ambulances to ALS and these were operationalised in May 2023, thereby providing each block in the State with its own ALS ambulance for advanced care during transportation of critical patients.

In 2023, an assessment was conducted with the objective of bringing down the response time still further and getting it reduced to 20 minutes. The objective assessment took into consideration technical parameters of daily distance covered by the ambulances, cancellation of calls due to unavailability of ambulance, distance covered by ambulances to cover long Inter Facility Transfer cases and average distance covered by ambulance to pick up patients in a district. Accordingly, in November 2023, the State inducted 236 new ambulances into the fleet, thereby further improving its performance and efficiency.

With this, presently the fleet size of ambulances under 108 service stands at 1,366 which includes 411 ALS and 6 Boat Ambulances.

Due care was also taken to manage the micro details of operation like tracking the maintenance and off-roading of vehicles with deployment of ambulance processes by the Service Providing Agency. Call dispatchers were oriented to reduce the call handling time. Recalibration of the call center process was done for reduction in call handling time among other measures.

”These measures led to the transformation of the Emergency Medical Ambulance Service under the 5T initiative and enabled us to achieve our target of improving fleet efficiency and reducing response time. At present 1,366 ambulances under the Emergency Medical Ambulance Service (EMAS) fleet are attending to about 1.3 lakh patients each month,” the official added.