One Shropshire address makes 291 ambulance calls in a year
More than 250 calls were made to paramedics from a single residential address in Shrewsbury in the space of just one year.
West Midlands Ambulance Service received 251 calls from the address in Shrewsbury.
It also received 188 from an address in Market Drayton and 132 calls from a property in Telford.
The figures were released by the service to illustrate the strains put upon paramedics by repeated call outs.
In one case 291 calls – either 999 or 101 – were made from an address in the WV10 area, close to the Shropshire-Wolverhampton border, in 2016 – of which a patient was taken to hospital on 23 occasions.
The service also took calls 248 times from an address in Tipton, near Dudley, but on only six of those occasions did an incident result in a patient being taken to hospital.
Elsewhere in the Midlands, an address in Bilston made 203 calls, 156 in West Bromwich and 154 in Walsall.
The greatest number of calls in the region came from an address in Birmingham with 492.
There were also two other address – both in the WV10 area on the edge of Wolverhampton – which made 197 calls and 172 respectively.
West Midlands Ambulance Service today urged people to think twice before calling 999 because they could be diverting an ambulance away from a more urgent medical emergency.
It said the trust is aware of high volume service users.
And it puts in place ‘care packages’ to find solutions to combat the issue where a problem is identified with a particular address.
Spokeswoman Claire Brown said: “The trust cannot comment on individual cases due to patient confidentiality.
“However, around the region the trust is aware of a number of high volume service users.
“West Midlands Ambulance Service works with the local health economy and social services to put in place care packages that are designed to find alternative solutions for individuals who are frequent 999 users.”
The figures overall across the region have gone up in comparison to 2015.
The data, obtained by the Shropshire Star, comes after separate figures revealed call handlers with the West Midlands Ambulance Service received almost 2,000 abusive calls between 2013 and 2016.
Figures revealed hundreds of verbal attacks across the country in the past three years including threats to kill, and racist and sexual slurs.
It caused union chiefs to call for harsher penalties to be brought in to protect ambulance control room workers from the abusive callers.
