St John Ambulance PNG continues its work in providing ambulance services to the people and with the tireless efforts, continue to save and help as many lives as they can. The partnership with the Government and the Provincial Health Authorities that St John Ambulance Council is focused on expanding ambulance service stations across the key provinces. The focus at the moment is in partnership with the Gulf Provincial Health Authority (PHA), the East Sepik PHA, and Madang PHA to re-establish the emergency ambulance stations in those provinces so that the people can have access to the triple one emergency service. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of St John Ambulance, Matt Cannon said that St John is seeing a substantial increase in the workload with several people calling for help each day increases continually. He added that according to statistics, St John Ambulance has helped around 21, 500 people last year and out of those, 99% were able to have the service delivered to them entirely free with no cost and that’s because of the great support from the National Government and also the support from the Provincial Governments as well including NCD, Morobe and East New Britain Province. “We’re seeing that increase every year and with the survey that we carried out, we are very proud to report that 97% of patients surveyed last year were very satisfied with the services that they received from the ambulance service.” “This gives a lot of pride to our ambulance service men and women that take an extreme risk sometimes every day to respond to remote communities to respond to urban communities and into settlements and people’s houses to render vital lifesaving help to people that urgently need help.” In addition to this, Cannon expressed that it is incredibly important that there’s support coming from their respective partners in the efforts in the work of what the medics do on the frontline and deepening that relationship and integration is so important. Meanwhile, whilst carrying out their daily duties, Cannon outlined some challenges as the main is keeping up with the demand. “There’s more demand now in Morobe since we only have one ambulance operating 24 hours a day compared to NCD where we operate with six ambulances, 24 hours day.” “This saw that just last quarter alone, we attended to 3, 000 emergencies in NCD and 1,500 emergencies in Morobe.” “As you can see with six ambulances in NCD, we were able to manage that demand well enough but unfortunately in Morobe we are seeing four to five emergency cases sometimes at the same time needing help but only one ambulance available to service the communities in the province.” “This is something that we’ve raised importantly to the PHA to see how they can assist to ensure that this vital service is available to more people in Morobe.” However, overall, Cannon was very thankful for the tireless efforts and the great work that the green angels; the ambulance service officers do for the people and commended them for their hard work. St John has over 300 fulltime staff across the country with 250 employed in NCD.