‘Make your own way to hospital’ plea by North West ambulance service (From Preston and Leyland Citizen)

‘Make your own way to hospital’ plea by North West ambulance service

9:49am Thursday 16th December 2010 in News By Neil Docking, Reporter

AMBULANCE chiefs have asked patients to make their own way to hospital if possible after a staggering rise in emergency calls.

Control rooms were swamped with 999 calls last weekend, on a scale usually experienced only on New Year’s Eve.

The service received 7,377 emergency calls on Friday and Saturday, a figure just short of the 8,022 calls made last December 31, 2009 and January 1.

Paramedics admitted they struggled to cope with the ‘massive jump’ in demand.

And the surge prompted Darren Hurrell, chief executive of the North West Ambulance Service, to plead with patients to consider whether they needed an ambulance at all.

He said: “If your life is not in danger and we won’t get to you for several hours, is there someone else you can call, your son-in-law, your brother, to get a lift to hospital?

“We’re saying to everyone before you ring an ambulance, ask yourself are you ill and do you need to go to hospital?

“If you feel that you are, then think if you have a safe alter-native way to get to hospital.”

NWAS failed to reach the NHS target for responding to urgent calls at the start of December, as the wintry weather hit.

Despite the thaw, there were more calls this weekend than during the peak of the heavy snowfall last January.

The trust revealed last month that a woman who had broken a nail and a man suffering from constipation were among the most ridiculous 999 calls it had received this year.

And a trust spokesman said that while there had been an ‘unprecedented number of calls for people who were genuinely ill’ last week, people had to use common sense when calling 999.

Mr Hurrell said: “Staff work incredibly hard but we are resourced for the level of work we normally have.

“If there is an extra 25 per cent of calls we do not have 25 per cent extra resources sitting idle to deal with them.

"We work full tilt most of the time.”