Among other things, the draft amendment to the Law on State Emergency Medical Services envisages the creation of a new type of medical rescue teams, namely motorcycle units. Medical rescuers on motorcycles are to reach places that cannot be reached by ambulance, that is, among other things, during larger gatherings and during traffic obstructions. There should be no more than one motorcycle unit for every 400,000 residents. The first motorcycle units are expected to become operational on July 1, 2025.
Kos said that the health ministry plans to set indicators for hospital emergency departments. The deputy minister explained that one ED is to secure an area with a population of no more than 200,000. According to Kos, this will allow an ambulance to arrive in up to 45 minutes. The maximum time for receiving a patient from an emergency medical team will be 15 minutes. The idea is to eliminate such situations in which ambulances wait outside EDs for tens or sometimes even hundreds of minutes. Hospitals that fail to comply with the new standards will be penalized financially, up to the possibility of breaking the contract. This is one of the threads that raised the biggest doubts, by the way, with MPs questioning whether the health ministry really considers it possible and expedient to terminate the contracts of the most besieged emergency departments in the largest cities, where such situations also occur.
Kos added that the issue of handling corpses in situations where death has occurred in an ambulance will also be regulated - the team will have clear guidelines on where the corpse of a deceased patient should go. - I do not allow situations in which the ambulance takes over the corpse," he stipulated.
An important change is to concern the definition of first aid. Referring to a long list of changes, Kos mentioned that after the change in the regulations, a drug prescribed by a doctor will also be able to be administered by witnesses to an incident - this raised questions from MPs, but also from the public side. Responding, the deputy minister specified that this refers, for example, to the administration of epinephrine in anaphylactic shock. At the moment, if the drug is in range, it cannot be administered - and this is about to change.
The decision to keep 999, which will operate alongside 112, was well received. As the MZ explains, there are data confirming that the time of a call to a medical dispatcher via 112 is twice as long as when calling 999. On the other hand, there is controversy - and will certainly be controversy when the draft goes to the Parliament - about lowering the requirements for candidates for dispatchers: at the moment three years of professional experience is required, the MZ wants to lower it to a year. Marek Kos explained this by the lack of applicants willing to work. - Perhaps dispatchers should simply be paid more? - suggested Janusz Cieszynski (Law and Justice).
