The Federal Government has stepped up its nationwide emergency medical intervention with the deployment of 13 ambulances to Ogun State, in a fresh push to cut delays in accessing life-saving care and strengthen emergency response across the country.
The Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Dr Iziaq Adekunle Salako, disclosed this on Friday in Abeokuta while handing over three Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) ambulances, one Basic Life Support (BLS) ambulance and nine tricycle ambulances to selected health facilities in the state.
The Ogun deployment comes on the heels of the initial rollout in Riyom, Plateau State, as the Federal Government accelerates implementation of the National Emergency Medical Services and Ambulance System (NEMSAS).
Salako said the intervention, being implemented under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda, was designed to overhaul emergency medical transportation and pre-hospital care by connecting dispatch systems, trained emergency personnel, ambulances and referral hospitals into a coordinated national network.
According to him, the first phase of the nationwide rollout comprises 145 tricycle ambulances, six boats, 15 BLS ambulances and 79 ATLS ambulances, with Ogun State among the beneficiaries.
He said the newly deployed vehicles would serve Federal and state tertiary institutions, including the Federal Medical Centre, Abeokuta, and Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital, alongside selected high-volume and hard-to-reach health facilities.
Salako also linked the emergency medical intervention to efforts to reduce maternal and newborn deaths, revealing that NEMSAS and the Maternal Mortality Reduction Innovation Initiative had provided free emergency obstetric care to more than 48,000 women, including over 4,000 free caesarean sections.
He said the interventions had contributed to a 17 per cent reduction in maternal deaths and a 12 per cent reduction in newborn deaths across 172 high-burden Local Government Areas.
But the minister warned that the real test of the ambulance rollout would not be ceremonies or the number of vehicles distributed, but how effectively they respond when lives hang in the balance.
“The true value of these ambulances will not be measured by their presence at today’s ceremony, but by their performance in moments of crisis,” Salako said.
He listed emergencies such as mothers requiring urgent transfers during labour, victims of road crashes needing rapid stabilisation and children suffering respiratory distress as situations where every minute could determine whether a patient survives.
The minister charged the Ogun State Government and beneficiary health facilities to ensure that the ambulances are properly deployed, maintained and used exclusively for emergency medical services.
He further insisted that the vehicles must be operated by trained personnel and backed by adequate operational funding to prevent the intervention from degenerating into another fleet of underutilised government assets.
Salako said the Federal Government would continue to collaborate with state governments, hospitals, emergency responders and other stakeholders to expand the emergency medical network and bring rapid-response care closer to Nigerians, regardless of where they live.
The latest deployment underscores the Federal Government’s attempt to tackle one of the country’s persistent healthcare challenges: the deadly gap between the point of an emergency and the arrival of definitive medical care.
