"if
2
T
A few private hospitals in Hong Kong have their own
These are unlikely to be available in an
ambulances.
emergency.
b)
I do not have a figure for the average time taken
for an ambulance to reach the scene of an accident.
The reason is that the Fire Services Department does
not have the staff necessary to analyse the 850 calls
a day which the Axbulance Service now receives. But
from time to time the Department analyses samples of
calls in order to check on operating performance, The
Department did the last analysis on a sample of 250
emergency calls answered in June this year comprising
50 calls from each of 17 depots distributed over the
whole territory. They found that attendance times in
respect of 903 of the emergency calls were within the
target attendance times the Government uses for
planning purposes, that is 10 minutes in urban areas
and 20 minutes in rural areas. As it will never be
possible to achieve the target times in 100% of cases, given such uncontrollable factors in Hong Kong's particular environment as traffic congestion, this
result is considered satisfactory.
/The trial
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