The National Ambulance Service opened in 2004, largely in response to the Accra Sports Stadium disaster in 2001, where 126 football supporters died in a stampede. Public confidence in emergency services has remained limited since.

Battling with entrenched attitudes, where people often use taxis in emergencies or think of ambulances as used for carrying corpses, finding people in densely populated and rural areas has been a challenge, and responses often come too late. Responders had typically struggled to find victims, and those in need of emergency attention would often waste valuable time trying to direct ambulances to their location. SnooCODE RED aims to considerably reduce response time. 

Over 160 emergency workers were trained on how to use the SnooCODE RED system, which is free and works without an Internet connection.

The SnooCODE RED app:

• Enables ambulances to accurately locate emergency scenes

• Reduces emergency response times in order to meet the international standard requirement of 8 minutes

• Provides management of ambulance services with concrete data that serve as the basis for medium to long term strategic operations planning

Today, we are working on a project with the Embassy of Switzerland in Ghana, the Emergency Medicine Society of Ghana (EMSOG) and the French Development Agency to integrate a model into SnooCODE RED that will allow emergency control centre operators to see at the touch of a button a list of the most capable hospitals to handle each particular emergency, helping to save more lives.

Click here to read more about the SnooCODE RED app.