Pranks of unconscious people, citizens calling an ambulance to take their blood or to take them to the TAEP are some of the things that the workers of the Ambulance Service have to deal with on a daily basis < p >Citizens call the ambulance for no reason, either to serve themselves, at the expense of others, or because they do not know how to use the services provided by ambulances or, even worse, simply to make fun of themselves. They call an ambulance to pick up their tests and take them to the chemist or even to take them to the First Aid, stating symptoms they don't have, just because they think that by arriving by ambulance at the TAEP they will have priority. In the past there were even cases where citizens thought it was funny to prank the ambulance crew, giving false information that a small child had fallen from the 5th floor of an apartment building. “Citizens do not know when and why they should call an ambulance,” the head of the Ambulance Service, Riana Constantinou, said in her statements to “P”.
The turtle and the dead
Indicative of what Mrs. Constantinou mentions is an incident recorded a few days ago. Citizens called the Ambulance Service and after reporting that a turtle was injured and bleeding they demanded that an ambulance go to the scene to pick it up and take it to the General Hospital for treatment. This incident is one of many that Ambulance Service workers are called upon to manage, whether we are talking about people working in the call center or we are talking about paramedics and ambulance crew. Last year around this time, a call was received for a person with withdrawal symptoms, but according to Mrs. Constantinou, when the ambulance arrived the patient was dead and in the coffin. “They called us because they thought something might have changed in his condition and they wanted us to help them. The relatives insisted that we should check him because something might have changed in his condition”, added Ms. Constantinou.
For the analyzes
According to the head of the service, the biggest problem that the Ambulance Service operators face every day is the unreasonable demands of citizens who want an ambulance to come and serve them for issues that are not classified as serious and cannot be found endangering human life. The recent incident with the gentleman who called the service and wanted the ambulance to take him home to take a sample for analysis and take it to the chemist, instead of going himself to a private chemist or to the hospital, is illustrative. At the same time there are people who call an ambulance to go to their house to change their wound, from a trauma they had or from an operation. “Unfortunately, people don't realize that ambulances are valuable, their number is limited and they are only intended for emergency situations”, emphasized Ms. Constantinou, also emphasizing that there are not a few times where ambulances have gone to different places because citizens gave false symptoms when calling the call center.
They lie about…TAEP
“There are cases where citizens describe that there is a clinical picture and a symptomatology to go to the scene. However, once we arrived at the scene several times and after the evaluation was done by the crew, then it was found that things were not as they were described, but the citizen simply wanted to use the ambulance to be taken to the hospital”, said Ms. Konstantinou. He reiterated, however, that in such cases there is a possibility that the ambulance will not take the citizen to the hospital or even if he is transported, he will go through screening, where he will normally register and sit in the waiting room, like the rest of the other citizens who went by private vehicle to First Aid. What has become clear, from the number of calls received by the service, is that a portion of citizens consider the ambulance to be a vehicle that will take them to the First Aid or serve them at home with health care. Essentially, they are calls that have nothing to do with saving human life, but more for serving citizens in their daily lives, which, as Ms. Constantinou explained, does not fall under the competence of the Ambulance Service. “We should be very thoughtful before we call the Ambulance Service, because it is very important that our calls are free, so that we can save human lives,” concluded Ms. Constantinou.
