He didn’t die because there was no doctor. He didn’t die because there was no donor organ. He died because no one could get him out in time.
A 38-year-old patient lost his chance at a lung transplant because an air ambulance couldn’t be secured within the critical three-hour window. The calls were made. The contacts were contacted. Five air ambulance companies were reached. Not one could respond.
In medicine, three hours is an eternity. In public administration, three hours evaporates without anyone noticing.
An island nation, in the year 2026, is scrambling around trying to borrow a plane from someone — anyone — to safely evacuate its own citizens for life-saving transplants. And coming up empty.
Then comes the blame game. Then come the people who want to make this about why nobody “just got an air ambulance” — because that’s clearly the direction some are determined to steer this.
Years of stagnation, carefully maintained in the service of specific interests — not financial ones, mind you. Political ones. And now we’ve arrived at the reckoning. One man paid with his life for years of inertia and petty party-political calculation. Because it wasn’t only governments that failed him.
And as if our collective nakedness hasn’t been exposed spectacularly enough, we’re still debating whether the ambulance service should be under the State Health Services Organisation or operate independently.
If SHSO suddenly tells me it’s found the money to buy its own patient transfer aircraft, I’ll take my hat off. Because usually, the people running SHSO — and frankly the HIO too — are forever moaning that there’s no money for anything.
And now money is suddenly the burning issue, because the moment the ambulance service walks out of SHSO’s door — where it should never have been in the first place — the organisation stands to lose several million in HIO funding. Funny how institutional memory sharpens when budgets are at stake.
SHSO, by the way, only remembered to put together a proposal for developing the ambulance service on the eve of parliamentary debate on the National Ambulance Authority bill. Where exactly was this brilliant thinking during the previous seven years? Oh yes — you were busy trumpeting fleet upgrades. That’s not development. That’s keeping the lights on.
And why, as a patient confined to bed and needing transport to my doctor, should I be paying out of my own pocket — whether to you or to some private operator? And why, if something goes wrong, should I have absolutely no idea who to hold responsible?
The Health Ministry slept through this for years. And no political party bothered to wake them, because in Cyprus, sleep generally suits politicians just fine. Now everyone’s scrambling to find someone to blame.
An Independent Ambulance Authority was promised, of course. The current government — which inherited this festering mess — eventually threw up its hands and settled for a National Ambulance Authority instead. Not independent, though. For the reasons why, you’d probably need to ask the Finance Ministry.
And there we were, saying that after GHS came in, the Health Ministry would be out of the plasters-and-bandages business for good. Instead, we’re going backwards.
Ambulances couldn’t fit into the Crisis Management Authority, apparently. In every country with a functioning emergency and pre-hospital care system, they work perfectly well alongside the fire service and civil defence. In Cyprus, in true Cypriot fashion: they just don’t fit.
Fine. Let’s take it on faith that this new Authority will eventually evolve into the independent body it should have been from the start. I just hope I’m not still writing “the independent Authority will be established” as I’m clearing my desk on the way to retirement.
I also hope this Ministry-run Authority can actually expand pre-hospital and emergency care services — and move towards securing an aircraft of our own. One that serves our people the way they deserve.
Of course, we can carry on screaming whenever a crisis erupts — about the five companies that couldn’t spare a plane, about the HIO that couldn’t get one man abroad. I’m not saying the HIO handled everything perfectly; clearly something went wrong, or we wouldn’t still be talking about it days later.
Nobody is without blame here. And we’ll be watching very closely when the time comes for the HIO to sign contracts with private operators for routine patient transfers — to see what they actually do. Someone in that organisation once told me: “We don’t want too many providers.”
We’ll see about that…
