Delhi govt to outsource operation of its CATS ambulance services

Delhi government has decided to outsource the operation and maintenance of its CATS ambulance services and Control Room in order to offer prompt and effective services, reducing the response time further.

New Delhi: Delhi government has decided to outsource the operation and maintenance of its CATS ambulance services and Control Room in order to offer prompt and effective services, reducing the response time further.

The Health department has floated an expression of interest on Jan 9 which says, "The Centralised Accident and Trauma Services (CATS), an autonomous body of Delhi government, invites expression of interest from eligible bidders to shortlist them for issue of a request for proposal (RFP) for the further bidding process for selection of bidder for operation and maintenance of CATS ambulance services and Control Room."

The document also says that the Health department will come up with a Hi-tech Modern Control room at Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital, Tahirpur soon.

"The proposed modern control room will have video wall for supervision of all CATS ambulances along with real time call in queue status, caller location identification system to locate the caller based on GPS/GIS data of mobile handset, application based real time call transfer to ambulances at MDTs, application based event log for all ambulance activities and pre-hospital notification system to alert concerned hospitals," says the note by Health department.

"The modern control room will function as main control room with real time data recovery through cloud technology and in case of its failure, the existing control room at Bela road will function as 'back up control room'," said a senior Health department official.

Presently, 197 ambulance officers and assistant ambulance officers are working in CATS on regular basis.

"CATS shall be administrative controlling authority for regular ambulance staff and also meet all expenses on account of their salaries, allowances and facilities, until their retirement. However, for operational efficiency, the assistant ambulance officers will also be under the operational control of the selected bidder.

"Presently, 240 ambulance paramedics and 378 ambulance drivers are working in CATS on contract basis at monthly remunerations of Rs 15000 and Rs 11000 respectively excluding EPF & ESI as NHM contractual staffs are exempted by GOI gazette notification.

"The selected bidder shall engage all these existing contractual ambulance paramedics and ambulance drivers at not less than the present monthly remuneration along with all applicable statutory provisions. The contract will be entered between the selected bidder and the above mentioned contractual staff of CATS," said the document.

Delhi government has also issued notification of Award for procurement of 110 more CATS ambulances

At present there are 152 ambulances which includes 21 Advanced Life Support (ALS) ambulances, 10 Basic Life Support (BLS) ambulances and 121 Patient Transporting ambulances (PTA).

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