Misuse of ambulances

[Lampshade7]

I work for one of the ambulance trusts. We have many, many people who phone up several times a day wanting ambulances. They are sent out but never need them. Obviously this is a vast waste of resources and time. If I had my way I would not send an ambulance no matter what the reason. One of my colleagues was horrified by this and said that they should be sent just in case. I think stuff them, you can cry wolf once too often. IABU?

Really? When I've thankfully rarely had to call an ambulance I was asked many questions - enough to decipher that it wasn't a paper cut and more that someone was clutching their chest / full on cardiac arrest. Who's calling the police though? I wouldn't even acknowledge one on the street let alone call them of my own volition

OP, what type of job do you do for the ambulance trust?

If someone is repeatedly calling an ambulance, then they are highly likely to have some degree of a mental health issue. I find it very sad that both the ambulance service and police service seem to spend a lot of time responding to people who should be being supported by mental health services or social services. These poor individuals who go round in circles in need of help and the front line workers who must feel frustrated at the situation, then of course there’s those in genuine need of an ambulance who have to wait in pain, fear and the impact that wait has on them. I really believe that our country would be very different if it had decent mental health care and social services. In the short term, there’s no easy answer but they can’t not attend to people who call.

Just out of interest how would you boycott them?
Blacklist the address? People move
By their name?
Condition?
I'm curious

I get your frustration but I'm glad you are not in charge of dispatch because people don't deserve to die.

@AlternativePerspective

Why must every unreasonable behaviour always be attributed to “mental health issues”? Obviously some people have MH issues, but are we not allowed to acknowledge that there are some thoughtless twats out there who really do waste the time of the emergency services?

People don’t want to believe it happens because they themselves wouldn’t do it. But it really does. And people know they can get away with it because others will justify it on the basis they “obviously are suffering with MH issues.”

MH is becoming too much of a get-out for twattish and unacceptable behaviour these days, and that means those with genuine MH issues are far less likely to be taken seriously.

I've been taken to hospital with brittle asthma and they tried to dismiss me with mental health issues. No word of a lie, a paramedic told the A&E staff that I just had agoraphobia. I'd never met him before, and I was kept in hospital on oxygen mainly for 16 days with my, diagnosed for 8 years brittle asthma. The A&E staff were furious when they realised what he'd said could have cost me my life.

There was a thread on here woman ranting about hours and hours wait for ambulance .
She did have a medical need for hospital she said she rung numerous times chasing then on the last call said she told them not to bother and her husband drove her in .
Why didn't he take her in the 1st place and he was there with her all the time

Your trust should have a frequent callers policy and an APP who deals with this group of service users.

The idea of the policy is to look into the reasons for the frequent calls (genuine or otherwise) which can be chronic illness, social needs, mental health/substance abuse and then work with the patient and/or their carers to find a more appropriate way to deal with their situation and to put in place services/equipment to facilitate this.

On occasions this will involve liaising with the police and very rarely might result in an ASBO, and then even rarer with a prison sentence for breech of asbo.

Your trust also presumably has a clinical desk manned by paramedics, nurses and APs who can "no send" to calls. So the days of everyone who calls getting an ambulance are long gone.

@BattenbergdowntheHatches

If someone is repeatedly calling an ambulance, then they are highly likely to have some degree of a mental health issue

Not necessarily. Some people are just so stupid they don’t know what an emergency.

The person who mugs your granny and nicks her pension for drugs probably also has a “mental health issue” but it doesn’t stop them being punished.

I’ve had GAD and depression most of my adult life so I’m not belittling it. But every Tucker and his dog blames MH for everything these days, so unless you’re willing to lock up 90% of the population, and pay 100% of your net salary to the Ambo service, stupid twats are still going to ring ambulances when they don’t need one.

It clearly is some form of mental health issue or distress - because calling an ambulance multiple times a day or week is hardly a fun pastime. Quite the opposite. There's going to be some mental or social care need. (I'm not talking about general anxiety - except perhaps a very severe form - possibly panic attacks).

Excellent post by sazza76. We need to invest in properly funded and run mental health care and social services.

If you really do that job you are probably aware that there's no need to change anything, people are abandoned, neglected and killed every day while waiting up to 24 hours for an ambulance. No way would I associate myself with that big pile of shit, it's beyond criminal. I literally had a call today about a relative who died after waiting 5 hours for a cat 1 call out. He died after 5 hours from a heart attack, ambulance rocked up in the ninth hour despite many calls to cancel it.

I get the frustration, but you can't refuse to send an ambulance.

You simply don't know whether or not the one time you refuse an ambulance could be the one time they really do need one.

I don't know what the solution is. A number of the frequent callers probably do have significant mental health issues which cloud their judgement and for which inadequate treatment is available, if any at all. Others are just too stupid to understand what a real emergency is. There are hoaxers too I assume, and they are lowlife scum sometimes dealt with by the police if they can catch them.

Surely there's a training course or something you can go on if you are having difficulty with your response to this situation. We're constantly being told that the only problem with the NHS is funding but the staff themselves are all great. Don't go fucking that stored goodwill up with damn fool threads like this.

I think that comment is a really low blow. NHS workers are human too, and they're allowed to vent their frustration like anybody else - especially the emergency response team, who end up with all of the passed bucks. I'm not saying that the abusers should be denied the same rights as everybody else, but when it comes to NHS resources, they're hardly helping, are they? It costs a huge amount to send an ambulance out.

Are you saying that, if you constantly received hoax/ridiculous callouts for whatever your job is - preventing you from getting to people with a genuine need for you - you would turn up with a smile every time and not even be a little annoyed? Yes, the people making the endless calls are often vulnerable in certain ways, but so are the people having heart attacks, brain haemorrhages and being smashed into by drunk drivers.

Every time I've needed an ambulance, either me, or the person calling for me have had to answer so many questions to make sure it's needed.

But I assume you/they are relatively calm, lucid, reasonable and compliant when calling? If somebody faked an inability to breathe, cried out and spoke in forced gasps that they were dying, whilst refusing/ignoring any questions they were asked, an ambulance would be sent anyway - as their circumstances could just as easily be somebody in genuine desperate need of urgent assistance as somebody who knows how to 'perform' to get an ambulance out, even though there's nothing/very little wrong with them.

There definitely should be some kind of referral system afterwards for people calling multiple times a day/week, rather than just checking them and discharging them. I maintain that anybody who needs/claims to need an ambulance five times a day, every single day, is not capable of independent living.

The right kind of targeted help - going through their living and independent vs (possibly self-funded) residential accommodation options with them and making it clear that medical staff could act in their best interests if they were deemed to lack capacity - would both serve as a massive wake-up alarm call to the faking attention seekers who realised their game was up, whilst also proving a huge relief to those genuinely in need of ongoing medical assistance, that they might finally be helped to get it.

I should have refreshed first - x-posted to an extent with a few other PPs.

There was a thread on here woman ranting about hours and hours wait for ambulance.
She did have a medical need for hospital she said she rung numerous times chasing then on the last call said she told them not to bother and her husband drove her in.
Why didn't he take her in the 1st place and he was there with her all the time

I think this is a wider part of the problem, in that people see an ambulance as something that their circumstances merit or are simply entitled to as a basic right, rather than as a precious, limited, expensive resource to be used only by those for which it is necessary. It isn't there just to validate you or your health requirements as being 'serious'.

There are probably also a few who just want some pictures to post on SM, to get themselves attention and sympathy, in a way that being driven there undramatically by their DH/DW wouldn't really cut it.

I watch the “Ambulance” programme (which I know is TV) .. and there us often a bit of side-eye around why people are calling ambulances.

Plenty of cases where people could get themselves to a hospital, or a GP visit is more appropriate, or it’s something that isn’t really medically related.

I know the staff always say “that’s what we are here for” or “you did the right thing calling us” … I do sometimes think they should also be educating people about what an ambulance is / isn’t for.

It does feel like people have lost the ability to do minor first aid, or use the pharmacist - it’s like the ambulance is the first point if call, rather than the last.

Part of the problem (well quite a lot), is the lack of decent, local, “out of hours” care (I should also have said properly funded)

The big emergencies get lost in a sea of minor calls …

With gp services and ooh access more restricted people may delay seeking treatment until they feel more acutely ill. Ambulance also highlighted inadequacies of mh provision which created a cycle of repeated call outs and lack of intervention. Not everyone has transport or relatives they can use to get themselves to hospital .

People who “check in” on SM at A&E will be first up against the wall come the Battenberg revolution. Followed by the “u okay hun” crew.

I'm loving the sound of the Battenberg revolution!!

I agree that the “u okay hun” crew only serve to enable and encourage the drama llamas. Maybe if, instead of faux concern, they all instantly responded with a stoic, resigned "Well, we all gotta die sometime, babes - and you've already had a better innings than some get", they might stop doing it

@BattenbergdowntheHatches

It clearly is some form of mental health issue or distress - because calling an ambulance multiple times a day or week is hardly a fun pastime

You’d think not wouldn’t you? But it often is nothing more than laziness, inability to comprehend danger, need for drama due to boredom/shit life syndrome or self-righteous anger because they can’t see a GP/get what they want from a GP.

Until being thick as mince and/or a selfish tosspot is declared a MH condition, and all sufferers are locked up, there will still be unnecessary callouts.

Absolutely!

I think many people on MN don’t realise that there are people out there who genuinely do call ambulances because they think it’ll enhance their life in some way. They may be feeling neglected by their family, bored, rejected by their partner, hurt by their friends, or they just feel a bit insignificant and pointless. Having an ambulance with trained paramedics arriving makes them feel special, and it makes their loved ones sit up and notice. The drama makes them feel better. These people don’t have mental health problems. They just have rather pathetic lives. It’s all very sad, but it doesn’t warrant taking an ambulance from a genuine emergency.

We recently waited an hour for an ambulance for my husband who had suffered a massive stroke, luckily 999 were brilliant and got me through to a call handler straight away but the wait for an out of area ambulance was awful. There will always be people who misuse the system but I am not sure that refusing to send out an ambulance is the answer.

I think that when people call an ambulance or indeed police and are wasting time and it transpires there is not an emergency, the answer is prosecution and a court case. Not refusing to send them on the day.

Plenty of cases where people could get themselves to a hospital, or a GP visit is more appropriate

Some GPs themselves don't help the situation. My mother's surgery (crap at the best of times) upped the drawbridges at the start of the pandemic and have still not lowered them again. No face to face still, only phone calls if you are lucky. Nor do they make home visits. If they think someone needs to be seen for any reason at all they send paramedics, who usually arrive in an emergency ambulance - thus tying up resources that are probably needed elsewhere. This has happened several times to my parents, and a lot of the time the GP could have dealt with it.

All of the GP Surgeries in the my mother's town are under the same management, so it isn't possible to change to another one. Especially as my mother is in her eighties, lives alone now and can no longer drive due to poor eyesight and other medical issues. She has no choice but to accept this.

So some GPs themselves are not helping the problem of ambulance availability, and in some cases are adding to the woes.