UK ambulance service pleads with public to stop making non-urgent calls

The UK's ambulance service is pleading with the public to stop phoning them with non-emergencies.

With public health services stretched thin in the U.K., there is no shortage of anecdotes about people suffering from true health emergencies who wait hours for medical care — whether from paramedics or a hospital doctor. But the UK ambulance service said 15% of its 426,000 calls last year — 175 a day — were not urgent. Some weren't even health-related and were far from being matters of life and death.

There was a call about a chipped tooth ("it's starting to throb"), a bloody toe ("I’ve cut my little nail on the toe and I’ve nipped across the top of it.") and a person who stuck their finger in an electrical socket who appeared to be fine ("I’m worried that I could be electrocuted").

Then there was the call Emma Worrall took last year that she won't soon forget.

“I remember saying ‘alligator?’ and my call-taker supervisor just looked at me and was like, ‘What is going on in your call?’” Worrall said.

As a dispatcher in a busy call centre in Wales, Worrall has to be unflappable, patient and able to efficiently handle the most stressful calls in which a delay of seconds or minutes could be the difference between life and death.

She understands that some people have a different gauge of what is life-threatening and an emergency. But it's still frustrating when someone phones the emergency number to say they’re locked out of their house and cold or their dog jumped in a river and won’t swim back — calls she also fielded.

“We just ask everybody to find alternative pathways before phoning for an ambulance,” she said. “The ambulance service is for those who are experiencing life-threatening problems.”

Worrall’s craziest call came one afternoon when a man phoned to say his son’s pet alligator had escaped and was hiding under the sofa.

“I asked if he’d been hurt, and he said, no. he was scared,” Worrall recounted.

He wanted paramedics to help him corral the toothy reptile.

“I told him that we wouldn’t be sending an ambulance for something like that. And he said, ‘So you’re not going to send me any help until I get bit, is that right?’ I went, ‘That’s correct.’”

The South Western Ambulance Service in England this week said more than a quarter of the one million-plus calls it fielded last year did not merit sending help.

The non-emergency calls included a person looking for assistance in finding their walking stick, a patient who had fallen off a chair — who was already in the hospital — and a woman who complained of having a “horrendous nightmare.”

Emergency calls “are for situations where minutes matter and lives are at risk,” said William Lee, assistant operations director at South Western Ambulance. “Inappropriate calls tie up our emergency lines and divert valuable resources away from those in genuine need."

Worrall was gobsmacked the aligator caller thought paramedics were the panacea for his problem. When she got off the phone, she took a short break and shared the story with her amused colleagues.

“We did have a little chat about that and, yeah, back to work I went,” she said. “On to the next call.”