No Parking: Ambulances At Mater Dei Hospital Are Missing Calls Because They’ve Been Clamped
Private ambulance operators contracted to work at Mater Dei Hospital have been forced to deal with a rather unusual problem in recent weeks: having their ambulances clamped by the hospital’s security.
Parking at Mater Dei Hospital can be quite a nightmare, as anyone who’s had to visit loved ones in hospital can attest to, and while it is understandable for parking rules to be enforced, clamping ambulances actually being used by the hospital feels like it’s a step too far.
“Isn’t it obvious that an ambulance needs to be in hospital?” Charlton Caruana, the owner of a private ambulance company asked in a Facebook post this evening.
“It seems that the people of KIS Ltd only take orders from their manager in Italy. They also insist they don’t take orders from the police. So it seems that ambulances cannot park in Materi Dei.”
Speaking to Lovin Malta, Caruana said that a private company engaged by the hospital to oversee parking was insisting on clamping all vehicles including service vehicles like ambulances and police cars.
“It is absurd. We’ve tried speaking to the company but it insisted it had orders to do so from the hospital,” Caruana said.
However, he said that he had spoken with the head of hospital security and was informed that no such direction had been given to the contractor – a company called KIS Services.
Caruana said that an ambulance that was due to collect a patient this week couldn’t do so because it had been clamped. “They wouldn’t remove it and we had to shift all the equipment to another ambulance and use that.”
As things stood, ambulance drivers didn’t know where they could park their ambulance, he said.
“The company told us that we could park anywhere as long as it wasn’t in the emergency department car park but when we did they, our ambulances were still clamped,” Caruana said. “We have no idea where we’re meant to park.”
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