‘Firefighters and police ferrying casualties’

A FIREFIGHTER has spoken out over his concerns at the number of instances when police or firefighters have ended up taking casualties with non life-threatening injuries to hospital.

The man said ambulances should be sent to accident scenes where other emergency services are present and there is a casualty.

In Gower last week police took four people to hospital, including one with a broken wrist, more than two hours after the car they were in crashed and rolled over in freezing weather at night.

They, along with a fire crew, had been waiting for paramedics who didn’t arrive because, according to ambulance bosses, so many ambulances were stuck outside Swansea’s Morriston Hospital at the time, trying to off-load patients.

“The fire engine should have been there for 20 to 25 minutes,” said the firefighter, who asked not to be named.

He said he appreciated the difficulties faced by the Welsh Ambulance Service (WAS) but felt it wasn’t right that other emergency services were being tied up in this way.

He said: “Over the past two months in particular these delays are impacting on fire service and police incidents. This is becoming the new normal.”

The man said WAS’s process of categorising calls — red for life-threatening, amber for less urgent, and green for less serious than that — should be tweaked to factor in the presence of other emergency services.