EWN reports that the Khayelitsha Health Forum has scheduled a meeting with police, the Khayelitsha community policing forum and local neighbourhood watch groups to set up teams that will be available 24 hours a day to safely escort ambulances to their patients in the area.  

There have been two attacks on ambulance staff in the area in recent weeks, while paramedics were also held at gunpoint in Kraaifontein.  The forum's Mzanywa Ndibongo said that paramedics should not have to fear for their safety when on duty and the setting up of teams was one of the solutions to help curb attacks on paramedic discussed at a health summit in the area over the weekend.  There are several red zone areas in some of Cape Town's gang-stricken communities that ambulances cannot enter without a police escort, but patients could die while ambulance crews wait for police to escort them.  “We are going to start a pilot project in Site C, Makhaya, and Harare because those places are red zones,” Ndibongo indicated, adding that the forum was also planning awareness programmes to teach residents that they were partly responsible for ensuring the safety of paramedics.

• Read the original of Lauren Isaacs’s short report on this matter at EWN

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