Patients can wait: Ambulance used as school bus to ferry children

Driver of the vehicle blamed the Chief Medical Officer and even said the school has a bus but does not make use of it.

Patients in Chhattisgarh's Manendragarh would be lucky to get an ambulance during school hours. And while a medical emergency requires immediate attention, a particular ambulance - that could perhaps have been the difference between life and death - has instead been used to ferry students rather than patients in need.

News agency ANI reported that an ambulance was recently spotted in Manendragarh - some 280 kilometres from the state capital of Raipur, carrying school students. When the driver of the vehicle was asked about his passengers, he blamed the Chief Medical Officer (CMO). "This has been happening for the last year and a half. The CMO asjed me to carry them as there is no bus. The school got a bus five months back but they have not used it," he said.

Why the school has not made use of a bus procured, if indeed it was, is not clear. To use an ambulance instead could be a criminal act in case a patient dies for the want of timely medical attention.

Such incidents, unfortunately, are not rare. While there have been several reports in the past of non-availability of ambulances with relatives of patients resorting to unconventional ways out of desperation, an ambulance in Uttar Pradesh's Kannauj was recently spotted carrying goods - reducing it to a mere transport vehicle.