Gran Kaz donation to help boost health’s emergency services |03 August 2017
The Gran Kaz Casino has donated over R500,000 to the Ministry of Health which will go towards the upgrade of the ministry’s emergency services, more specifically the installation of a call recording system at the command centre and 20 new emergency bags.
CJ Laurent, the chief executive of Gran Kaz, presented the cheque for R521,182 to Dr Kenneth Henriette, the acting chief executive of the Public Health Authority, in a short ceremony yesterday at the Ministry of Health’s headquarters.
Present at the ceremony were the Minister for Health Jean-Paul Adam and senior management members of both the ministry and the casino.
According to Dr Henriette the call recording system, which costs R350,182, has already been installed in the command centre located at the Sheikh Khalifah Diagnostic Centre and has been operational for over two months now.
A novel addition to the command centre, the call recording system is being used to record emergency calls in a digital and audio format from both ends - the caller and the receiver - of every emergency calls the command centre receives.
With a wealth of information contained in every call, call recording will allow the ministry to better monitor and record what has been said, by whom and when.
A call recording system is a feature of any advanced health system because there are significant benefits to be gained from implementing a call recoding solution such as fact verification and risk mitigation.
“The system permits us to examine the calls afterwards and see what was said during the calls. It covers the training and education of staff, the liability we have against a complaint and of course security. It helps secures us. Say for example you have a complaint tomorrow saying that you have called three times and you got the person but was offensive or insulted you, we can check that call and make sure that is really what happened and the ministry can take the necessary measures,” Dr Henriette explained to Seychelles NATION.
He also stated that the recording system also acts as a deterrent to those who abuse the command centre services and staff because these callers will be more cautious once they are made aware they are being recorded.
Moreover the ministry plans to use the call recording systems as a tool for the training of paramedics and emergency responders, whereby trainees will be able to listen to past recordings in order to learn on what to do or say and what not to.
The remaining R171,000 out of the R521,185 will go towards the acquisition of 20 new emergency bags which will be distributed between paramedics and clinics all over the country.
Minister Adam expressed his gratitude to Gran Kaz’s act of kindness stating that the donation will go a long way in facilitating the work of first responders and by proxy improving the effectiveness of pre-hospital services.
“This is a generous donation which is immensely appreciated by our health professionals because it is being invested to make it easier for them to do their job on a daily basis.”
The minister went on to say that such a donation plays an important part in the ministry’s modernisation process where the ultimate aim is to bring the standards of our public health facilities on par with those of OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). In fact the Ministry of Health recently announced its plan to standardise and revamp its ambulances as one of the steps towards modernisation (refer to our edition of July 22).
Gran Kaz has been donating and helping out the ministry since December 2016 as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the company’s chief executive, Mr Laurent, calls on other organisations to help out the Ministry of Health, whose staff work “really hard to provide the country with adequate health services”.
