Another baby was born in an ambulance yesterday – again ‘racing’ to reach a functional maternity unit in time (or rather, not).
This time it was the firefighters of Caxarias who did the honours, on the A1 motorway, near Ourém.
The mother had called for assistance around an hour before she eventually gave birth, her plan being that she would be transported to Leiria Hospital.
SIC reports however on a tortuous line of decision-making which involved firefighters manning the ambulance being instructed to drive 30 minutes out of their way in order to meet with a VMER (medical emergency and resuscitation vehicle) from Santarém (because the Leiria VMER was busy).
The destination was always meant to be Leiria hospital, explains SIC, but via assistance from a VMER.
Once this assistance was sorted, the ambulance headed back up north, in order to reach Leiria, but didn’t. “Mavi was born on the A1, about 30 minutes from the hospital”, says the report, which reads a little like something from a black-and-white Keystone Kops movie.
Happy outcomes aside, this was getting on for the 60th birth on the nation’s roads, in some form or other, as pregnant women try desperately to give birth in SNS state hospitals.
In many of the recent occasions, it has been firefighters themselves who have delivered the babies, without the assistance of a doctor, or nurse. And this opens the question: why are we accepting that firefighters can deliver babies due to SNS constraints, when doctors would never be expected to fight forest fires?
Last week, presidential candidate (and potentially front-runner for the job) Luís Marques Mendes challenged health minister Ana Paula Martins to ‘address the nation’ about what is fast becoming a source of national embarrassment. But still, there has been nothing.
Source material: SIC Notícias
