$630M for 50 ambulances

He spoke at a news briefing on Thursday at his Ministry at Park Street, Port-of-Spain, before inspecting the latest additions to the fleet. The nationwide supply of ambulances is being doubled from 25 existing ambulances by the addition of 25 new ambulances, Deyalsingh said.

Also present at the event was Paul Anderson, CEO of provider, Global Medical Response (GMR), a Colorado-based firm, which has run its service in TT since 2005.

Deyalsingh said he had inherited this contract and did not know if it had originally been tendered. Asked if the cost was high, he said it includes training, communications, repairs and other costs.

“What price value do you place on a patient’s life?” he asked.

Anderson, in reply, said GMR must service 1.4 million persons living in every square mile of this country.

“We do about 75,000 responses a year. Last year we transported 53,000 persons to various hospitals. We provide a service every hour of the day, every day of the week for the entire year.

It’s a very high utilisation that continues to go up.” He said there is a cost to providing such service, which he said, he’d anecdotally been told, is less than the cost of the country’s garbage collection.