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The Administration thanked the Legislative Council Public Accounts Committee (PAC) for the various recommendations it made in the PAC Report No 51A on the emergency ambulance service, a spokesman for the Security Bureau (SB) said in response to the release of the report today (May 20).
The spokesman also said the Administration was proactively implementing the recommendations put forward in the Audit Report and the PAC Report to continue improving the emergency ambulance service.
¡§The Administration will continue to, as we have done before, ensure that the Fire Services Department (FSD) will have the required manpower and equipment for its emergency ambulance services to achieve its performance pledge to the public,¡¨the spokesman said.
¡§The decisions we made on resource allocation in the past few years have generally enabled the FSD to achieve its performance pledge of 92.5%. For instance, the response time performance was 92.7% in 2006, 92.8% in 2007, 92.2% in 2008 and 93.5% in the first four months of 2009.¡¨
Having regard that the response time performance in 2008 differed from the performance pledge by around 0.3%, on manpower, the FSD will create about 120 posts in the ambulance stream in 2009 to meet the service demand.
On the replacement of ambulances, the relevant government bureaus and departments, including the SB, the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau, the FSD, the Government Logistics Department and the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department (EMSD), are discussing the long-term mechanism in determining the number of ambulances to be replaced and the measures to shorten the ambulance procurement process.
This was to ensure that the FSD would have a sufficient number of ambulances to provide quality emergency services.
Funding provision has been made for the FSD to replace 196 town ambulances and procure 21 additional town ambulances. The procurement work is being carried out at full speed. The first batch of 35 new ambulances has already arrived and committed in frontline service. The second batch of 35 new ambulances is expected to be delivered by the middle of this year, while the remaining 147 new ambulances will arrive in batches before the end of next year. After all new ambulances have been commissioned, the age of the FSD¡¦s ambulance fleet will be reduced from the current average of around eight years to 1.6 years.
The spokesman said that to keep the existing ambulances in good operating condition, the FSD and the EMSD had stepped up preventive maintenance. Vehicle parts with frequent failures, such as batteries, water pipes, pumps, engine fan units, belts and pulleys would be replaced in advance. The departments have also increased the frequency of scheduled maintenance from once every four months to once every three months. The EMSD will thoroughly examine ambulances that have suffered a mechanical breakdown to find out the reasons for such failure. Where necessary, the EMSD will inspect all ambulances of the same model to prevent similar faults occurring.
The spokesman said the SB and the FSD would report to the PAC and the Audit Commission on the implementation progress of the recommendations made in the report and would complete the relevant follow-up actions as soon as possible.
Ends/Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Issued at HKT 18:57
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