Press the number 9 on your phone three times in the UK and you will get put through to one of the three blue light services. Two will tell you where to go if they think you don’t need their services and one will send you a response regardless. Two of these services educate the public as to when it is appropriate to ask for their assistance and one will send you a response regardless. Two of these services are classed as Emergency Services and one is classed as an essential service.
We’ve all read the text on the screen and wondered why we are being responded to a job. Not only that, we wonder why we are being responded using our lights and sirens. Yet the more we are responded to these jobs the more people will request an ambulance for trivial issues. Issues that you or I would have gone to the pharmacy and bought some medication for or issues that we would go and see our GP over. Yet for some reason the Ambulance service view an in growing toe nail as a life threatening condition that requires an emergency ambulance to respond at high speed from miles away.
I recently read somewhere that the ambulance service is slowly morphing from a pre-hospital provider to an out of hospital provider. All because the ambulance service will always send a response instead of saying “you don’t need an ambulance for that”. When someone does turn around and say no the national newspapers get hold of the story and damn the ambulance service to the ground. So what does the service do? Instead of offering a reason for saying no they just write out a cheque and normal service is resumed.
These trivial jobs are drowning the ambulance service. They are becoming more and more frequent and are the main reason why ambulances services up and down the country are reporting that there are not enough vehicles to respond and people who actually do need an ambulance are left waiting.
