Wallace: Host school responsible for emergency services

Wallace was responding to questions posed to him yesterday in reference to Wednesday’s SSFL third round fixture between Queen’s Royal College (QRC) and Fatima which saw the absence of an emergency vehicle and the use of players to stretcher off their injured schoolmates.

According to the long-standing SSFL executive member, scenes such as these are normal to the tournament since competing schools, hosts to be exact, must provide an emergency vehicle to render assistance on the day.

“Schools are responsible for that part of their set up. All the Premiership teams should have an emergency vehicle on hand and the visiting school is supposed to be told where it is located, in addition to the match commissioner,” he said.

“It doesn’t have to be an ambulance. We don’t expect schools to necessarily have ambulances at their disposal but a vehicle that can take someone to a health facility. They are supposed to have a stretcher at the game and an arrangement would be made for the use of that stretcher,” Wallace continued.

When asked the possible outcome of non-profess ionals (students/teachers/ team staff) slipping/ falling while stretchering off their injured colleague and causing further damage to the already hampered player, Wallace cleared the air on such risks and admitted that there was no direct way of determining, at that point, if the athlete had been further injured.

“How do you determine further injury?” he questioned. “Let’s say someone is being stretchered off the field from a knock on the knee. They may not know the extent of the injury, it may have been broken, fractured or whatever.

And they’re coming off the field and the stretcher falls, how are you to determine that the person was further injured? In the first place, they didn’t know the extent of the injury to start with and there was no medical prognosis on it.” But, Wallace admitted that all injured players who seek medical attention and are charged a fee for these services, the sum will be split into three and paid equally by the concerning parties.

“How can you determine if the person was further injured? What we have in place however, is if players are injured during games, the League provides one third of the medical expenses.

The other two parts are to be funded by the school and the parent of the athlete. That’s how it’s done for the SSFL all the time,” he concluded.