Medicine on Wheels: How Healthcare Reached Bahrain’s Villages

From a Model T Ford to a satellite-tracked ambulance fleet, Bahrain’s emergency care journey began one village at a time

TDT | Manama

Email: mail@newsofbahrain.com

Before paved roads and bridges linked Bahrain’s scattered villages, reaching a doctor often meant a donkey ride or a boat trip to Muharraq. For many communities, medicine simply did not come to them.

That began to change with a man named Salaam — a former patient who stayed on at the hospital and took the wheel of a small motor car, ferrying a physician to those who could not make the journey themselves. The vehicle was nicknamed “The Little Traveller”, and by around 1920 it had become Bahrain’s first ambulance.

According to historian Fouad Al Shakar, the mission was straightforward: an early Ford doubling as a mobile dispensary, a doctor, a nurse, and medicines handed directly to villagers who turned out in numbers for care they had never before accessed.

From that single car, emergency services steadily expanded. The Bahrain Petroleum Company opened a hospital with ambulance transport in Awali in 1937. The Ministry of Health launched its own service in 1950.

By 2007, the system had unified under a single national emergency number — 999 — with GPS-tracked ambulances, advanced life-support equipment, and free care for citizens, closing in minutes the distances Salaam once crossed in hours.