LETTER | The recent Next Generation Mers 999 issue put the safety of our nationwide emergency number at risk. Ambulance service timeliness was put into question.

Two issues were highlighted:

(1) People could not get through to 999.

(2) When they did get through, the safeguards of the right ambulance in the right area for the right patient appear to have failed.

Two different systems owned by two different ministries. Issue (1) belongs to the Communications Ministry, and issue (2) belongs to the Health Ministry.

Looking at issue (2), sending the wrong ambulance to the wrong areas due to a borderless policy requires proper scrutiny.

Ask any experts from MAMPU (Unit Pemodenan Tadbiran dan Perancangan Pengurusan Malaysia), and they will outline the government standard operating procedure on how digital system implementation should occur.

It always starts with a committee within the ministry that comprises experts and end users in the field. So, NG Mers 999 for the Health Ministry should have had that mechanism in place.

A system needs to be verified on its capability before being rolled out or going live. The User Acceptance Test requires the experts in the committee to scrutinise the process step by step.

Here is where the Malaysian Medical Council guidelines come into play. A borderless ambulance system requires an algorithm to activate the ambulance. The algorithm here is the artificial intelligence prompting the 999 system to send an ambulance from Penang Island to Kedah to an incident, as it is deemed the nearest.

MMC’s guidelines require a human to approve the recommendation as a fail-safe. The ambulance service is healthcare. Human knowledge and intervention in healthcare should be standard until they can verify that the machine functions 99.99 percent right all the time. What more in a new system like the NG Mers 999?

As a Malaysian public and healthcare professional, it is frightening to see the flawed NG Mers 999 implementation.

The MMC must step in and check how the team in the Health Ministry approved such a flaw in the system. Or is it a mere “tidak kisah” attitude of Health Ministry ambulance responders to adhere to recommendations from the system and respond to Kedah from Penang Island?

Any sane medical dispatcher would not have approved such an insane recommendation. So how did it happen?

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.