The 3-year-old British boy who died waiting for emergency services in April did not receive an ambulance because they were all occupied at the time, the Shanghai Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission said on its microblog late Monday.
The commission's admission underscores Shanghai's ongoing ambulance shortage, which has only grown more acute as the temperature has risen over the last few days.
By its own reckoning, the Shanghai Medical Emergency Center has only half of the 1,000 paramedics necessary to meet the city's demands. Since the weather turned hot, the center has been running at full capacity, said Guan Min, a senior official from the center. It dispatched ambulances to 1,100 calls Monday, 10 percent more than usual.
In a more recent example of the problem, an 88-year-old man died Sunday while waiting for an ambulance that arrived 40 minutes after the center received his emergency call, the Shanghai Evening Post reported.
In the case of the British boy, the emergency operator told the caller that he would have to wait because there were no ambulances available, so the boy's family decided to take him to the hospital themselves.
The Shanghai Emergency Medical Center received the call at 8:01 pm on April 15 from a restaurant in Huangpu district. The caller said a small boy had collapsed at the restaurant and required an ambulance at 706 Hankou Road.
However, all of the ambulances from the five nearby emergency medical stations were out on calls. The call had come in during the peak hours for medical emergencies, according to an official investigation reported by the news portal people.com.cn.
The downtown restaurant is located about two kilometers away from Changzheng Hospital, a top medical facility. However, the boy's family first took him to a hospital that didn't have an emergency room, Sun Ying, a manager at the restaurant, told the Global Times at the time. He was then taken to Central Hospital of Huangpu District, but it didn't have the facilities to properly treat the boy, who had suffered an intracranial hemorrhage.
At 8:11 pm, a nurse at the hospital called for another ambulance to take the boy to a larger hospital with specialized facilities to treat children, according to the post. However, there were still no ambulances available. The boy had died by 8:34 pm, at which time the hospital called the center to cancel the ambulance.
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