4 days ago
Irish ambulance crews called to deal with shaving cut and high temperature
People have dialled 999 and had an ambulance sent to them after suffering a high temperature, a pain in their tummy and a cut shaving, we can reveal.
These are just some of the scandalous calls that paramedics have been sent to deal with across the country in the past fortnight - leaving less crews free to deal with real life or death emergencies.
Now ambulance crews say they are seriously frustrated with the Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System - AMPDS - which deals with the 999 calls.
They claim it over-prioritises certain calls and sends ambulances out when there are no lives in danger.
They are being sent long distances for non-emergency calls and it is putting lives at risk elsewhere.
The NHS in Britain have had a similar system for years but now some NHS Trusts are phasing it out and replacing it with a new Pathway system.
One senior paramedic said: "There are serious flaws in our dispatch system. Each call is supposed to be triaged in terms of the risk to life but it is not happening in certain cases.
"Only last week we had to drive two hours to Monaghan Hospital to pick up a patient with a high temperature and bring them to Cavan because there were no doctors around after hours in was little or nothing wrong with the patient.
"In another case we were sent to the Cooley Peninsula to pick up a woman with a simple pain in her stomach. She was waiting with her little bag to be brought to the hospital.
"There is absolutely no way an ambulance should have been sent out to her. A relative should have brought her to her GP first.
"There are people out there who think the ambulance service is a transport service and they think they will be treated quicker in hospital if they go by ambulance."
But the paramedic told how last week things went from bad to worse.
They were being sent out to deal with a patient with a pain in Meath and then got a call about a young girl who had gone into a diabetic coma.
The pain call was dropped and they went and saved the teenager's life.
The ambulance driver said: "If we had gone on the other call there would not have been an ambulance crew around to deal with the coma case and that girl would have died.
"What is happening is just insane. We also had a man who called 999 a few days ago at 2am after cutting himself shaving three days previously.
"It turned out he was drunk and had pricked his face where it had bled. He was fixed in 10 seconds with a plaster.
"There is no way an ambulance should have been sent to deal with him.
"Most of the crews across the country don't trust the AMPDS dispatch system and it is leaving towns without an ambulance and no cover if a serious incident occurs.
"But because the shaving man mentioned blood it was prioritised as a life threatening situation and we were sent out to deal with him.
"The ambulance service is supposed to be dealing with emergencies but in many cases, it is not.
"People are really abusing the system by calling for an ambulance when there is nothing seriously wrong with them.
"And unfortunately our dispatch system is letting them away with it and sending us out to treat them when there is clearly no life at risk."
The National Ambulance Service said it has no plans to discontinue the use of AMPDS and also uses a clinical hub of specialised paramedics, doctors and nurses to help triage the 1,200 emergency calls it receives every 24 hours.
It stated: "The nature of phone triage is such that the call taker must rely solely on the verbal information passed to them and the resulting categorisation will depend entirely on the information shared or available at the time.
"As with any triage system in practice, the risks of over-triaging are balanced against the risks of a very sick patient not being detected. Consequently, occasional occurrences of over triage may be expected."
