A man came on the line sounding as if someone had died.
“You need to send someone. We need someone here!”
“What’s the problem…” I began.
“She’s BROKEN HER TOE!”
I sighed inwardly. As you know, we’re not allowed to comment on the appropriateness of a call, so I ploughed through the questions in a monotone, being careful to emphasise words like “conscious” and “breathing” in an attempt to bring home the point that ambulances are generally for people who have problems in one of these areas, not those who have BROKEN THEIR TOE.
This didn’t faze our lovely caller, who answered every question with “No, but she’s in pain!” Well, yes, it generally is painful when you’ve broken your toe. The call, unsurprisingly, came out as a Green 2, the lowest of the low.
His piece de resistance was his answer to “And when did this happen?” The toe had been broken yesterday, when the patient had stubbed it against the door.
I tried to bring the call to a close, but the caller was going on and on: “Are you sending someone? Are they on their way? She is in pain!” and wouldn’t take the stock ambulance service fob-off of “help will be with you as soon as possible” as an answer. I was going to just say goodbye and hung up, but felt this man would be ringing up every five seconds if I didn’t say something to him. If the QA office are reading this, please accept my apologies.
“The 999 service is for serious and life threatening emergencies,” I said. “We prioritise all our calls, and yours is the lowest priority. Do you really consider this to be a life threatening emergency?”
“Yes!” said the caller. “She’s in pain!”
Well, I tried.
I checked on the call a bit later and there was a message from the Telephone Advice people upstairs: “Already spoken to this patient - no send policy invoked - self care advice was given, patient to make own way to hospital if needed. Will ring back and advise.”
I thought that was the last of it. But it wasn’t.
Five minutes later the caller was back on the phone, and this time, he had the bright idea of answering every question with the opposite of what he’d said earlier. Is she conscious? No. Breathing? Struggling! Quick, quick, send us an ambulance. Didn’t you call earlier for a patient with a broken toe? No, no, that wasn’t me. Just send the ambulance.
As it was now a category A emergency, we not only had to send an ambulance, but a FRU (first response car) as well. The FRU was a lot closer to the call than the ambulance, and the FRU desk asked the FRU to report on arrival due to the nature of the earlier calls to this address.
FRU arrives, finds a fully conscious and well patient with a broken toe. He rings us straight away and tells us to cancel the ambulance. I don’t know what he said to them, but he was on scene for a grand total of six minutes, including doing his paperwork.
It’s a shame there isn’t a law against wasting ambulance time like there is for the police.
