The reports of the rescue of our editorial manager Philip Somerville in yesterday's paper are both gratifying and disturbing.
It is good to know that the South has an effective Otago Regional Rescue Helicopter, primarily sponsored by the Otago Regional Council, staffed by skilled pilots and St John paramedics.
They were able to apply emergency treatment to Mr Somerville on a remote Wanaka beach and fly him direct to the care of Dunedin Hospital.
On the other hand, the quality of the emergency call-taking in Christchurch was appalling, in this particular case, and, additionally, delays were caused by the system itself.
These faults must be closely examined for, while in Mr Somerville's case the delays proved not to be crucial, they could in other circumstances have proven fatal.
The public in the South rely on the most efficient rescue and emergency services that are possible to provide, and the demand is high over such a large geographic area, covering all possible types of terrain, which presents its own special challenges.
Much of what went wrong with the call-taking in this example should be relatively easy to fix, even now that the system has been centralised for some years in Christchurch.
After the problems were raised with St John, following inquiries by Mr Somerville, the service reviewed the details in conjunction with police and hospital emergency staff.
To its credit, St John has freely admitted failings occurred and has promised to learn lessons from the incident.
The call-taker involved was still a trainee, although well through this process, and was simply not up to the task, lacking both ability and confidence.
Given the high quality of the St John mapping systems, she should have been able to locate even the remote location of the accident promptly, should have realised the potential seriousness of the injuries, and her responses should have been much more flexible. She responded as if she was following instructions for an accident on a city street corner.
This raises questions about St John's recruitment standards and its supervision of trainees; in a well-run organisation demanding high standards from staff, these matters will continue to be addressed.
The case raises - once again - whether, if a call-taker had been based in Dunedin, there would have been far greater familiarity with the region, with rivers like the Matukituki, and remote locations, closer to the emergency personnel who might be required to respond in any rescue.
Such speculation seems fruitless, since the the return of emergency services control rooms to the South is unlikely.
It remains wrong that ambulance and police in Christchurch still have separate computer systems, so that ambulance call-takers must laboriously record details and then repeat the whole process when St John contacts the police.
A project under way to make the computer systems compatible so that information is automatically transferred is overdue and should be completed expeditiously.
Time was wasted in this accident as well because of what might be described as "demarcation" matters between the ambulance service and police.
This issue may be difficult to overcome but there is an obvious need for answers.
Because Mr Somerville's accident occurred at a location more than 30m "off-road" it technically and officially became a "search and rescue", and therefore police permission was required before the emergency helicopter could be dispatched.
This is ridiculously bureaucratic and inflexible: it was plainly obvious no search was needed since the call for help came from the location which was provided; yet quite obviously paramedic help was urgent.
Still, the ambulance call-taker, who had already wasted so much time, had to formally contact the police communications centre in Christchurch, which then had to formally seek out local police - in Wanaka, in this case - before St John received the word to proceed.
A senior police call centre officer has said that in practice St John can have rescue plans under way and ready to action before formal authority comes through.
St John has responded that police have been emphatic for the Te Anau, Queenstown and Wanaka areas that express permission much be sought first.
We suspect this tail-chasing lies at least in part in funding: will the patient recovery/rescue - let alone any search - be paid from stretched ACC, health services or police budgets? Clearly, it can be foolish, expensive and wasteful for emergency services to respond to an incident before the true needs are clear.
But the existing arrangements, especially for the southern lakes region where patient recovery from remote locations is often a comparatively lengthy business, are clearly unsatisfactory, as this specific case has demonstrated, and they must be sorted out at senior levels.
When medical emergencies are involved the response must be focused on patient's needs, not on an erratic and inadequate bureaucratic emergency response system.
