Is the ambulance service being abused?

IT IS unacceptable that time-wasters are misusing the ambulance service (Letters). Those who call 999 for self-inflicted and trivial conditions or issues arising from drink and drugs should be charged — perhaps £200 for the first occasion and £400 thereafter. If they can afford booze and drugs, they can afford to pay for care.

JONATHAN EADON-SMITH, Flackwell Heath, Bucks.

THE ambulance service is not always used appropriately. I rang 999 at 1.50 am when my husband, Andrew, had severe pain in his abdomen and left shoulder. They didn’t even send a first responder. I was put through to the out-of-hours GP, who arrived five hours later. In the end, I had to take my husband to A&E, where we were told if we’d left it any longer, he’d have been dead from a ruptured spleen. He had blood transfusions and emergency surgery. After an investigation, the ambulance service wrote saying it would ‘like to take this opportunity to apologise for the experience that [my] husband experienced’.

ANNE MORRISON, Witney, Oxon.

THE reason paramedics wait for hours in A&E with their patients is not because of a shortage of trolleys, rather a shortage of hospital beds, doctors and nurses.

PATRICIA A. LUNN, Leigh, Lancs.

THE long queues of ambulances waiting outside A&E have nothing to do with being seen by a doctor. It is all to do with statistics. The clock does not start ticking until the patient is admitted. Thus, the time a patient has to wait to see a doctor or to receive treatment is measured from the time they are admitted, not from when the trolley is wheeled into A&E. The reason it’s so difficult to get an ambulance is that they are all stacked up outside A&E to improve the hospital response time.

KEN JAMES, Sutton, Surrey.