How long would you HOPE it would take for 999 ambulance call takers to answer the phone?

[nevereveragainneverever]

For many years I’ve had a recurring nightmare where something bad happens in the dream and I need to call an ambulance - but in my nightmare I get put on hold for ages while waiting for the ambulance service to pick up the phone.

Last night my nightmare came true.

I had to call 999 at 4.30am after getting some stern advice from my designated medical helpline to do so.

The 999 person asks which service I require. “Ambulance”, says I.

She tried to put me through but then said they were very busy ....and I was being placed on hold for the next available operator.

Now here's the thing; if you had a loved one who was seriously ill or injured / having a cardiac arrest / a child who was choking / not breathing etc - how long do you think you would reasonably have to be on hold to get the ambulance service to actually take your call so you could tell them about it?

I honestly thought it would be 20-30 seconds. After all they had no idea what I was calling about and whether someone was in grave danger.

Well….it was SIX AND A HALF MINUTES!!!!! 😩😠😲. On hold!!!! Before they even picked up the phone to ask if the patient was breathing!!

I am still so shocked by this. I’m NOT blaming them - that's not the point of this thread: they’re just so busy, I think understaffed by Covid and other issues and underfunding .

The 999 ambulance call handler took note of my symptoms and said it was a priority case due to chest pain, issues breathing, worrying oxygen sats, other symptoms.. and my underlying serious medical condition (cancer patient on chemotherapy, subsequently admitted to hospital).

The ambulance then took 2.5 hours to arrive!! On a priority call!

Again, I’m NOT blaming them; they had been delayed because they were flagged down in the road when en route to me by desperate parents whose child was sick…and whose own ambulance was delayed. It transpired that the ambulance they should have got had been commandeered by an aggressive, drunk 25 year old man who was demanding a trip to hospital by ambulance for his injured fist - that he got by punching a wall.

You couldn’t make it up! The crew did the right thing in stopping for the child in my view and again I'm not blaming the crew (who were fabulous) and who explained they have only had a total of ten minutes at base - in the last six months! The rest of the time it’s call out after call out - and he said it’s so often time wasters.

I despair. And thought you would like to know. I don't know what the solution is, but wanted to share my experience.

Rant over. Thank you for listening.

@QuestionableMouse

It took maybe 30 seconds to connect for me earlier today. The call handler warned me that even for a blue light emergency, it could take up to two hours and if possible, to take my mam to the hospital myself.

I wasn't able to take her myself and the ambulance came within 30 minutes.

The fucking government needs to start throwing money at the NHS to hopefully improve things.

What good would money do when there's genuinely no staff? It's shit at the moment, worse than I've ever known it.

I've waited with a resident for hours with a suspected hip fracture. They did keep ringing to apologise for the delay.

Can I just say I know a lot of people working for 111 right now who can't move for dental calls! And these are people who have overdosed them selves because they are in agony and can't see a dentist. Dental practices need to be held to account for the amount of patients they leave suffering and in pain if you cannot pay for the treatment. We really are heading back to Victorian times but it's nothing we weren't warned about we have had the same government in for over ten years. People are not joining up the dots.

I feel so much for all the paramedics and emergency control room staff and all of the nurses and doctors on the front line. The NHS is run on nothing but goodwill right now and I'm so grateful that it is even still standing although not for much longer but we knew this would happen if we voted tory back in and yet shockingly most of the country did..

We have an imbalance were GP have refused to see people and dental practices have and all other outside services and then we have poor individuals working 15 hour shifts on the front line. Dealing with the after effects of a broken unfair system.

@Starblind19 some of the dental stories I've heard are crazy. I rang yesterday to book my check up and hygienist. No problem, see you in 3 weeks (would have been earlier but work shifts)
They are temp checking and enforcing masks, and have worked all the way through when other dentists have shut
They also do denplan which I have, I pay about £16pm and it covers 6 monthly check ups and hygiene appointments plus dental work

I completely agree that it's unacceptable to have yo wait so long but who told you about the other ambulance being taken up by a drunk who had punched a wall? That is unprofessional and likely to distress you even more.

When I rang when I'd lost my young autistic son next to a river it felt like ages for them to answer. I was hysterical but time seemed to slow down. It must have been 5 seconds but felt like 15 minutes

When my son had a burst appendix and was so dehydrated and ill he couldn't walk they took an hour to get to us.

@gingercatsparky Have you ever tried moving a child with a completely snapped collarbone. She was screaming in agony and passing out everytime we touched her as well as her bone cracking some more. We couldn’t move her an inch else believe me we would have taken her. It took the paramedics an hour and the maximum amount of morphine to get her into the ambulance.

Also, this was the one and only time any of my family have ever used an ambulance in our lives. It’s not like we were taking the piss. It was 100% an ambulance job

I have a friend who works for the ambulance service and they are absolutely flat out. He is working shockingly long hours. He says the main culprit is 111. Lots of people are being advised to call 111 but the service are unable to deal with many calls and are automatically referring to the ambulance service.

He said that the whole situation is nuts and lots of real emergencies aren't being dealt with properly.

I think you are right @Hillaria
My mum nearly died when I was a child. She was haemorrhaging and the wait time was terrifyingly long. Without all the horrible details, she was lucky to survive. This is not a recent thing.
It’s a problem with our systems. I have had more recent experience of the problems in the system which led to the negligent death of a very close relative.
There are huge flaws in organisation ( referrals are just one example ) that need to be dealt with but won’t be when people insist on using it as a political punchball.

Much of it comes down to underfunding which was supposed to stop months ago when the NHS started getting that £350m a week we were all promised.

They want people to die, I may get jumped on, but it's clear to see we are being left to die. Covid and the sharad that goes with it has made sure of that, and the service we have/are being left with. Cuts, shortages etc, and an over populated country is all what equals a disaster. But still it continues to be added to 🤦‍♀️🥲

I had to call an ambulance for a patient at work who we suspected was having a heart attack, (I work in a pharmacy,) there was an off duty paramedic in the store who came to help and the ambulance service was so busy we called his daughter to come and take him to hospital, 45 minutes this poor guy was waiting and we’ve got other patients kicking off because they had to wait for their prescriptions.
His daughter came in the next day to thank us, luckily it was only a mild heart attack and he recovered really well but still, it’s shocking that he had to make his own way to hospital. What makes it even worse is the ambulance station is literally behind our store, not even 100ft from our back door.

I am a former NHS professional who is wanting to get back into a healthcare role after a career break, but not wanting to go back to my old role. I applied for a call handler role locally - they’re recruiting for 999 and 111 simultaneously.

I got through to the assessment round - basically you’re asked to join a teams call and are played a number of recorded calls, with some questions to answer after. There were over 30 people being assessed but the people running it couldn’t get it to work, many people had no sound or video - people in the chat window were asking for support or info but none was forthcoming. I’m told that teams isn’t really the best platform for so many people at once. I managed to get the audio working part way through, answered the questions from that point forward and submitted my answers, together with an email outlining the technical problems I’d had.

I got rejected because my assessment score wasn’t high enough, which is unsurprising considering the technical issues, and two days later the advert is back out, so it appears that none of over 30 people had managed to reach the threshold to get an interview - many of them very probably due to the technical issues. So rather than sorting out their tech issues and repeating the assessment, they’re adding a month on to find a new batch of people, and bearing in mind the training is 6-10 weeks they’re not going to have the new staff on board for Christmas.

In addition, my rejection email said that they are not providing feedback due to the number of applicants involved. But the new advert says that reapplications are only allowed after 6 months, to allow people to reflect on their feedback and improve their application.

For a service that is desperately short of staff, the recruitment people don’t seem to be very well organised or be very aware of the urgency of the situation…

@Neenaw999 I could see that the paramedics were actually quite frustrated by her saying she wanted to go to hospital and I don’t blame them at all. I think my knee if they said ‘choking’ they’d get a faster response. The ambulance crews are bloody amazing , i cried at one when they got an elderly lady off the floor that she had fallen on and been stuck all night until her neighbours heard her cries for help. They got her up, checked her over and made her tea to calm her down. They were so lovely to her that I cried (daft big sap). In the Scottish programme they have a single specialist paramedic in a car rather than an ambulance who goes to calls and sometimes treats people onsite or calls an ambulance is required. He can get to a patient much faster and provide first aid is an ambulance is still en route. I think they need more of these, he does great work.

@Yubaba the patients proximity to an ambulance station has very very minimal baring on the ambulance response time. At present my crews are only on station at the beginning and generally a few hours after the end of their shift, so they respond from station only for their first call of the day. they then bounce hopefully com job to honor get stuckat hospital with the first patient that they convey.

We get this a lot, and I understand why people think and rationalise but the station is just there... the station is empty. Similar to people that think an ambulance is sat on each street corner waiting for its next call, it's just not true.

We have areas that we cover with no ambulance station for 40 miles or more, if a ambulance is in your are, it's because theyve either cleared from another case in your area or conveyed to a hospital in your area,not because they're based there.

Excuse the typos sorry I hadn't to post yet.

This is one of the reasons that rural stations are closing and most services are moving to centralised hubs, theres little benefit to having community stations which cost to run but sit empty all day.

I think I know where at least some resources could be saved.

I called 111 about my infant a few months back. They entered the details and suggested an ambulance was necessary. I asked if I could drive him to the hospital instead. No, I was told. Ambulance came an hour later. They were lovely, but told us we had to take him to hospital and that it wasn't urgent enough for them to take him. Fine with that- it confirmed what I already knew: waste of an ambulance. They were with us for about an hour in total, mostly filling out forms and doing admin! No doubt a box-ticking exercise they've no choice but to complete. I hope nobody was urgently in need of their services. Such a waste of their time.

But this thread is really unsettling. I was under the illusion that if I dialled 999, help would be rapid. Our local hospital has cut services so that, at night, it's a 40 min drive to our nearest open hospital. Hope to God, we never have real need of an ambulance.

It's not just underfunding the NHS, it's the systematic underfunding of front line services that stop people being in crisis and calling 999.

This is worrying!

It’s down to poor leadership at the top…people need to wake up and stop voting conservative!

I think I know where at least some resources could be saved

I use to live opposite the hospital, I phoned 111 when I was bleeding really badly, they wanted to send an ambulance, due to the one way system its something like a 10 minute drive, where as walking it was 4 minutes. I told them not to bother and made my own way.

@EgonSpengler2020

TBH I am just repeating what they said, I will try and find the story, but I am sure the son (who was speaking) is a doctor