Stinking attitude or not, it seems the ambulance driver was completely in the wrong and it's not just the police who think so. This afternoon Jose Canul, formerly a medic with Belize emergency response team, told us that the driver of the ambulance was required to slow down at checkpoints and that there is no reason for an ambulance to be driving at 100 miles an hour. He also gave us some insight into how a hijacked ambulance might be apprehended.
Javier Canul, Coordinator
"I will say it is rather strange for police to stop an ambulance in my career at B.E.R.T we had this understanding with the police that they wouldn't stop the ambulance for no reason at all and the commissioner was right when he said there's no law and that the police have a right to stop an ambulance but how would somebody know when there's an emergency."
"Suppose somebody comes to me and holds a gun to me and says you need to move this ambulance we're going to Chetumal now. We always have a radio and nobody can tell me I can't talk over the radio. So once I hold my radio if I have a patient aboard with me. And I am being forced to move I can say B.E.R.T dispatch this is Delta Sierra and once you hear Delta Sierra everybody at B.E.R.T knows that there's an emergency and that we need to call the police."
"All medics who drive an ambulance must never run past a police checkpoint, you must never ever, why? Because you need to slow down the road is not as wide in the U.S. and even in the U.S. you still have to slow down, how long will it take for you to go for you to pass, stop, "Hi, I have an emergency", and you move on. The second thing is if you're driving with an emergency as a critical patient there are lights and there are sirens. If I'm coming with a patient down that highway and my patient is critical. I'm coming with lights and sirens not when I reach the checkpoint but long before I reach that checkpoint, a mile, two miles so the police will hear me from a distance and they will know it's an emergency so they won't stop me."
"But if they get a tip that says I'm being hijacked I have a radio where I can calmly tell the man to listen if I don't report. People will know that something happened so let me report and that's when you use the code and it's simple as that."
"But these things come with experience, one and two we have to remember that it's a young organization. To drive an ambulance at B.E.R.T from what I remember I don't know if it's the same, I hope it is, you have to take a defensive driving course, you can't jump, not because you're a driver we hire you. You have to be a medic and you have to be qualified."
"The police had every right to stop that ambulance the way according to how Mr. Williams said that the police had every right to stop that ambulance, you shouldn't drive like crazy as a matter of fact whoever is behind that ambulance should be trained enough to take that patient from point A to point B and keep that patient alive until that patient gets to the hospital. There's no need for an ambulance to drive 100 miles an hour, absolutely no need because of that why you have trained personnel behind that vehicle."
Again Canul stressed that critical emergency or not, a medic driving ambulance has no right to break a checkpoint.
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