Pre-hospital emergency care in sparsely populated and rural areas of South Africa

South Africa's emergency medical services (EMS) finds itself in a globally unique situation as far as the opportunities are concerned to develop and deliver EMS services to its people living in the rural and sparsely populated areas of the Republic. South Africa has a uniquely developed EMS. It is difficult to pin point exactly when our various ambulance services reached the historical developmental point where they could be called EMS but I personally would like mark that point in time as 2 January 1988.

By this time, two important things had happened. First, in-service paramedic students had completed their nine month training course and we had ‘critical care assistants’ working in various services in South Africa. Second, the first graduate paramedics had completed their three years training programme and were all employed in various services. The employment, in the January of 1988, of these men and women represented the product of about ten years worth of work by many motivated and gifted people and millions of Rands of investments by the state.