LAHORE: The Primary and Secondary Healthcare (P&SHC) Department has decided to launch a Rural Ambulance Service (RAS) for pregnant women in unprivileged areas of the province. Basic aim of the programme is to take expecting women, living in far-flung villages of the area, to basic health units (BHUs) and rural health centres (RHCs) so that the process of childbirth could be made safer, maternal mortality could be reduced and number of skilled birth attendants could be increased. At present, there is an ambulance service for BHUs and RHCs of seven flood-hit areas of Southern Punjab. Many pregnant women are taken to the health centres through these ambulances, saving precious lives in the process. Keeping the effectiveness of the programme in view, the P&SHC Department has planned to extend the project and has decided to run it on permanent basis. The ambulance service programme would be launched in selected remote areas of the province. Likely to start in the current fiscal year, the service would be free of cost and process would be simple, as patient’s family just has to call the ambulance service to carry the patient to a nearby health centre. Well-informed sources privy to this development told Daily Times that the government intends to establish a GSM-based rural ambulance service for Emergency Obstetric and Neonatal Care (EmONC) in all districts of Punjab under the Integrated Reproductive Maternal and Newborn Child Health (IRMNCH) Programme. He said to materialise this concept; a command and control centre would be set up in the office of IRMNCH, Lahore, adding that the response centre would dispatch, track and control around 300 ambulances running at the level of basic health units and rural health centres of Punjab. He further said that the Primary and Secondary Healthcare Department also invited the Expression of Interest (EOI) from suitable national/international credible firms/organisations/joint ventures for purchase of its equipment, installation and operational services to establish the command and control centre. In this regard, he added, services are required to provide an integrated command and control system equipped with tracking and communication system to run the ambulance service for six months. “On average, 45 to 60 deliveries are being conducted at 24/7 BHUs, which are 700 in numbers in Punjab. The system design should be strong enough to cater the existing workload and future expansions. The system should be able to cater approximately 50,000 calls per month,” he concluded.