Attitudes to emergency services are very different now, especially with cuts to public services. Nowadays the advice is more "don't call 999", rather than "call 999".
Following on from the thread about calling ambulances for broken bones: I was a child of the 80's so I only had the child's perspective on that period. Growing up, I was very lucky in that almost nobody in my family ever needed to go to hospital for anything, right up until my late twenties, so I had very little experience of the process, but I remember so many stories about ambulances being called all the time when children fell off bikes, always calling the police for this and that, and in those days police would be on the street regularly anyway, and doctors made home visits. I remember a lot of what we learned at school about emergency services; they were always there ready to be called, a policeman is your friend, etc. The only advice I remember about not calling 999 was for something that didn't happen, such as calling the fire brigade when there was no fire.
The above may of course have been the simplified, age-appropriate advice: anything wrong, call 999, you learn about appropriate use of public resources later. Was the advice for adults back then always to call 999, or "call a doctor" for lesser things? Nowadays, while something is going wrong before your very eyes, you have to make the careful choice of pharmacist/GP/minor injuries/A&E, and if MN is anything to go by, woe betide you if you get it wrong and waste the wrong public servant's time.
Is one reason we do things differently now because far more of us have cars, and mobile phones, and can more easily get someone to hospital? Is it that we can easily check symptoms on the internet, when we couldn't before? Are we generally more "informed" than before? (I remember my dad calling 999 to complain about a police helicopter that had been overhead for hours one night. Even I knew this wasn't an appropriate use of 999, but I said nothing.)
I do think this is relevant to now in a way, because people who were children in the 80's might now be new parents, and are suddenly faced with the modern ways of getting help, and their only experience might have been what they learned as children. (I expect many people are more likely to call emergency services for children, rather than for themselves.) Somebody who has been healthy all their life, and unfamiliar with hospitals in general, might automatically call 999 if they see a hint of an emergency.