Whoops-a-daisy: People slipping and sliding causing a strain on emergency services - Local

Sponsored by

Whoops-a-daisy: People slipping and sliding causing a strain on emergency services

Snow in Aylesbury town centre

Published on 21/01/2013 13:28

People slipping over in the icy conditions and ‘inappropriate’ calls are causing the emergency services a headache.

South Central Ambulance’s resources were stretched over the weekend as it received 4,166 emergency calls including 766 related to people falling over.

This compared to 3,472 calls the previous weekend with only 582 to do with falls meaning nearly a 32% increase in people slipping over.

Ambulance spokesman James Keating-Wilkes said: “Demand due to the winter pressures has been very significant. We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people falling over.

“We ask people to take care on icy pavements, care for your community and check on your neighbours.”

Another pressure for the ambulance service has been receiving numerous inappropriate non-emergency calls..

Mr Keating-Wilkes said: “We got one guy who had broken down on the M40 who could not get through to the AA so he rang 999 to get us to help him.

“At this time of year we get a high level of inappropriate calls. If we are out responding to those calls rescuers are not available for responding to genuine life threatening emergencies.”

However, he was pleased that drivers appear to have been heeding the warning of poor conditions and either not going out or taking extreme care, with only 111 calls related to road traffic collisions (an increase by three on the previous weekend).

Mr Keating-Wilkes also said the service owed a big thank you to all its staff, volunteers and to the Community First Responder teams which have even helped control room employees to work.

He added: “They have all gone that extra mile. We are very grateful for them.”

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Sponsored by
Whoops-a-daisy: People slipping and sliding causing a strain on emergency services

Top stories

News