Hoax 999 calls battle victory

2:21pm Friday 4th January 2008

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THEY are the scourge of our ambulance service - and the time they waste could make the difference between somebody living or dying.

But now, with the help of The Press, the battle against hoax and nuisance callers who plague 999 operators and leave paramedics seething is being won.

Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) chiefs are delighted after the number of unnecessary demands they receive for medical attention dropped sharply over Christmas and New Year, their busiest festive season ever.

In previous years, they have been forced to field scores of calls either from confused members of the public asking them to attend non-emergencies, or pranksters wanting anything from takeaways to taxis.

Last autumn, The Press teamed up with North Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service to embarrass the bogus 999 callers who put lives at risk by placing their pointless calls on our website and inviting people to name and shame them.

But Vince Larvin, YAS' assistant director of operations for North Yorkshire, said the message which has been sent out is now benefiting all the emergency services.

And that has meant the ambulance service avoided being hampered in doing its real and vital job, which saw it take 961 calls - 297 of them involving life-threatening situations - on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and 720 on New Year's Day, including 92 in a single hour as revellers greeted 2008.

"Normally at this time of year, we wouldn't have problems reeling off anecdotes about hoax callers, but I can honestly say that this year we have not been able to find them," he said.

"In York and the Dales, our resources are finely spread, and if somebody makes a prank call it can divert life-saving staff away from a genuine emergency where their skills are needed. There is nothing worse and more frustrating for our staff than that.

"Sometimes, people just think they are doing the right thing by calling an ambulance and sometimes it's malicious. It's not a joke, and the cold, hard bottom line is that when it happens, these callers could be responsible for somebody dying.

"But this year the number of nuisance or unnecessary calls has fallen greatly and for that we have to thank our staff, the public and The Press for what it has done to get the message across.

"It's clear people are now considering it socially unacceptable to make nuisance calls and that if they call an ambulance, it has to be on the basis of an emergency."

On New Year's Day alone, the volume of calls YAS took was 85 per cent up on a normal Tuesday, with 433 of them requiring an ambulance to respond and 185 being life-threatening emergencies. "My biggest fear at New Year is getting the right level of resources out to people - you never know how things are going to go and anything can tip the balance of our ability to cope," said Mr Larvin.

"But the support we have had has helped us provide fast response times despite an upsurge in demand, and our winter campaign has been very successful."