KOTA KINABALU: The Sabah Health Department has denied its ambulance was too late to respond to an emergency situation here where a man who is said to have suffered a heart failure eventually died on Wednesday.
This is after a local daily reported that paramedics only arrived an hour after a distress call was made to the Malaysia Emergency Response Services (MERS) 999 number.
State Health director Dr Rose Nani Mudin said based on their investigations, the call to MERS 999 was made at 12.06pm but that the call dropped while being transferred from the MERS 999 regional centre to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) medical emergency centre (MECC) here.
The call transfer was a routine verification process and also to obtain more details over the emergency from the caller.
She said the MERS 999 regional centre and QEH MECC made six attempts to contact the caller between 12.07pm and 12.19pm but that the latter was not reachable.
“This resulted in the ambulance not being able to be activated as the location of the emergency was unclear,” she said in a statement here yesterday.
According to the Daily Express, Lew Kok Fai, 54, from Ipoh, laid helpless in his car in Kolombong near here for an hour before help finally arrived following a call to MERS 999.
This has led to questions on whether it was wise to route emergency calls to either MERS centres in Kuala Lumpur, Melaka or Kuching compared to having a MERS centre specifically located in Sabah.
A witness, the daily reported, had also claimed that he had contacted the number to explain what happened and that the person on the other end told him someone would call him back but the call never came.
Meanwhile, Rose said MERS 999 received a second call from another caller at 1.01pm, adding there were more details obtained this time.
“A team from QEH2 was sent out at 1.04pm and arrived at the scene at 1.16pm.
“On arriving, the team found that the 54-year-old had no signs of life and his death was confirmed by a medical officer,” she said.