Sunday 8 March 2009

To call or not to call, that is the question...

Just as a quick suggestion, I thought I'd send the non-medically minded here for some advice on when it IS a good idea to call an ambulance.

After you've had a good read, allow me to give you a few ideas of when not to. These are calls that I have personally been sent to, so are not made up...

Please don't call if:

1) you have a paper cut.
2) you have been prescribed antibiotics for an ear infection, and 10 minutes after taking the first tablet your ear still hurts.
3) your mobile phone battery has nearly run out and your charger is not working.
4) you are a GP whose surgery is about to close and you don't know what else to do with your regular patient who's back again complaining of a sore throat.

There are many many more that I could think of, and if you're an ambulance person reading this, feel free to add some of your own. A prize of kudos goes to the most bizarre reason for a call out.

3 comments:

Tyke said...

Many years ago, a genuine enough call - but - an attempted suicide by drinking around half a litre of correction fluid, which he had apparently stolen from his place of work.
Some very strange logic involved there I'm sure, but we never did discover why he chose that particular method.

Happy1 said...

"Lost tampon" was one of the funniest 999 calls I accepted into A&E. Yep. Missing for 24 hours. A definate emergency that one.

RN

Neldo said...

At a large event we were called out to a "pregnant woman in distress". Tokk around 30 mins to find as the stewards weren't doing a very good job of describing the location. Eventually we found her and her true affliction turned out to be a broken false finger nail. I quietly returned to the first aid post to allow my brain to explode.