Emergency service to cut number of teams on duty at night

The Emergency Medical Service (NMPD) will reduce the number of teams on duty at night in some parts of Latvia, NMPD chief Liene Cipule said in an interview on Latvian Radio's "Krustpunktā" program October 31, promising that the changes will not reduce the quality of the service.

According to Cipule, the government's decision to cut the NMPD's budget for next year by €1.6 million was unexpected for the service but the NMPD saw it as an opportunity to reform the service.

"We saw opportunities to act because at the same time with what is happening around the budget, we see that there is an extremely high public demand for us, the public administration, to become more efficient," said Cipule.

She pointed out that the NMPD's task "has been for some time to transform the service to work more efficiently"

"We have the highest number of staff per population [in Europe]. Because there are more brigades and each brigade has more staff. What Europe can do with fewer brigades and working in twos, we do in threes and with more brigades. We have to look for efficiency, that is our task towards society, towards patients, towards the way we handle budget funding."

Cipule said that they had been preparing for the reform in the service for the last two months and had not yet been ready to make the changes this autumn. 

"There are a number of areas where we are working at the moment. These are changes in the organization of work, which affects the working hours of the brigades. None of the brigades currently deployed will be reduced. Where they are now, they will remain; they will be adapted to the intensity of the day's work and to the number of people in a particular brigade," said the head of the NMPD.

 

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