Paramedic’s time wasted on false call-outs

Emergency call handlers manning the 999 service in the West Midlands respond to around 4,000 emergency 999 calls every day.

With GP surgeries referring patients to 111 and 999 every day, the emergency call services are flooded with calls.

Between February 2019 to February 2023, according to the UK Parliament, the number of Category 1 callouts, i.e., highest level emergency calls, has risen from 1,952 per day, to 2,360 on average. (House of Commons Library and Baker p.18)

The category levels go from 1-4, with 1 being the most critical and 4 being the least critical.

Jake Sprake, an Ambulance Technician based in Dudley and Birmingham, said: “As soon as we end one job, we get another job immediately, regardless of which category it is.”

An Ambulance Technician works in conjunction with the paramedics to provide care, with differences in job roles such as they can’t cannulate patients, administer morphine, etc.

The 28-year-old said: “There’s been a few times when we’ve gone out on a job for something like neck pain, trapped gas, there’s limited things we can do with that.

“I think people have found out that when they call up with something like neck pain, they're waiting up to two hours for an ambulance.

“So, they’ll say they’re feeling breathless, or they’ve got chest pain so that will bump it up to a category one so we’ll go to these people who don’t really need an ambulance. So that’s really increasing the workload.”

Credit: Imogen Baller: ambulance van and car parked

Patients calling the emergency services awaiting call backs from a healthcare professional such as a GP are also waiting for longer periods of time. The triaging system was adopted in the NHS in March 2020 as a way to prioritise cases and cut down face to face consultations.

This system has forced some patients to wait for call backs from GPs for longer periods of time, Adrian Drew, a freelance writer said: “The GP ended up calling me back after about four or five hours later.

“But before that I did get a call from another person saying I would get a call, but they had a delay.”

An ambulance costs £225 to send out on one visit, the price reflecting the ambulance crew, vehicle and the equipment inside.

Wait times have risen post-pandemic with the service in more demand than ever. According to the UK Parliament data, wait times in December 2022 for a Category 2 call-out had risen from the target of 18 minutes to an hour and 30 minutes, reflecting the volume of callouts and the amount of wasted time paramedics spend with non-threatening cases.

Paramedics crews also spend much of their time waiting outside hospitals with their patients due to low capacity in hospitals, otherwise known as stacking.

Sprake said: “There's a limited amount of care we can provide to patients when we’re stacking outside.

“It can be thirteen hours with the same patient, outside, which limits our time and care for other patients we could have gone and seen.”