In Uzbekistan, it is proposed to introduce a practice of applying a fine in the amount of the cost of one call to the citizens who made the call in case of a false call to emergency medical assistance. This proposal was mentioned in the budget for 2024-2026, announced by the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
It was noted that the purpose of this is to expand the scope of providing emergency medical care to the population by organizing the correct and effective use of emergency medical services. The budget proposal also proposes a cap on chronic and ongoing emergency calls. It is noted that in 2023, an average of 178,200 soums from the state budget is spent on 1 ambulance call.
At the same time, the Administrative Responsibility Code stipulates that for deliberately deceiving special services, including the internal affairs body, fire service, and medical ambulance, a fine of 1 to 3 BCAs (from 330,000 soums to 990,000 soums) will be imposed.
According to the explanation given by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, despite the fact that responsibility is defined in the Code, there is no regulation on the procedure for applying fines. For this reason, it is proposed to develop a regulation on this matter, including clarifying the procedure for penalizing those who make several false calls to emergency medical assistance.
It should be recalled that in January-June 2023, a total of 1752 false calls were received to the emergency medical service. The indicator decreased by almost a thousand compared to the corresponding period of 2022. During this period, the total number of emergency medical service calls was 6 million 337 thousand.
