AN eight hour period over New Year’s Eve-New Years Day saw Herefordshire record the biggest increase in call volume for the whole West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) area.

The 42 999 calls that came in from the county between 8pm-4am represented a 14 per cent rise on call received over the same period for 2013-14.

WMAS says the majority of the calls were to the kind of “emergencies”  expected over New Year’s Eve and the early hours of New Year’s Day.

By December 29 the county had recorded more than 2,500 emergency ambulance calls in a single month.

Each of those calls required attention  from either an ambulance crew, a fast response paramedic,  community first responder or control room staff offering advice.

More than 600 such calls came in between December 23-29.

The most consistent complaints were breathing problems, falls and general illness.

Between December 1 to midday on December 22 the number of calls total topped 1,883.

Both West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) and Wye Valley NHS Trust  had geared up for extreme demand, but present levels are described as unprecedented - already up by over 100 calls on this time last year - with “life-threatening emergency” coming to define 999 response.

For blue light crews 999 means serious and critical illnesses or  patients that needed advanced medical treatment while headed to hospital such as choking, chest pain, stroke, serious blood loss or unconsciousness.

The festive season sent figures for WMAS as a whole soaring with a particular surge after the Christmas break.

Demand across the three days of the Christmas weekend (Friday 26th – Sunday 29th) showed a double digit rise over last year, with some areas hit by staggering spikes in demand.

 Saturday was the service's sixth busiest day ever with demand up 26% in Herefordshire alone.

Sunday saw demand in the county up almost 19%.

Such levels increase pressure not only on front line responders, but control room staff and the teams that keep vehicles on the road such as mechanics, stores staff, ambulance fleet assistants, hospital liaison staff, non-urgent patient transport and many others who carry out additional roles.

In the last year alone, WMAS received more than 28,500 calls in Herefordshire, a figure representing more than 15 per cent of the county’s population. 

A high percentage of those cases were non-urgent for minor ailments and injuries.

At the furthest extreme of those non-urgent 999 calls were “wart on a finger, “headache after a night out” and “stubbed toe”.

Context to the current pressures crews are under came in a report put to Herefordshire Council’s health scrutiny committee last June.

By then, the Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG) had been told that ambulance response to Red 1 calls, the most urgent, in the county became a “significant issue” over the past year.

HCCG buys and shapes health and care services, WMAS has the contract to provide ambulance services.

The scrutiny report put to council showed that while eight minute target performance picked up in February, it fell to 61 per cent in March, below the 75 per cent expectation.

In real terms, demand on the county’s 999 ambulance service is increasing year-on-year.