Nearly half of the calls made to 111 from the Western Bay over the past year were either made by prank callers or by accident. Telecom's 111 emergency call service received just over 89,000 calls from people in the Western Bay of Plenty and 47 per cent of them were notfor emergencies. Telecom spokesman Mark Watts said non-emergency calls could be put down to lots of situations but there were a few classic cases. "Someone can rang 111 then realise they don't have an emergency after all and hang up, or they have left their phone in their purse and it gets knocked, or it could be kids mucking around," Mr Watts said. Nationally, Telecom's Initial Call Answering Point (ICAP) operators answer about 2 million 111 calls every year. While there was an accepted allowance for "one-offs", operators had the option of calling a number back if it had called them repeatedly, Mr Watts said. In the case of malicious or prank calls, Telecom could involve police but it was rare that it got that far. Mr Watts said there had been an overall drop in the number of non-emergency 111 calls after they adopted an Australian procedure in 2008. Now an automated message greets callers briefly at the beginning of an emergency call. "Straight away it led to a reduction in false calls, by more than 20 per cent," Mr Watts said.
St Johns Midland region district operations manager Jeremy Gooders said ambulances in the Western Bay of Plenty responded to just over 15,000 calls to 111 in the year from March 2009 to February 2010. Often they turned out to be "minor ailments". "At times people call an ambulance when a different course of action would have been more appropriate," Mr Gooders said. Examples included callers suffering from coughs or minor injuries. "This appears to be mostly a problem in large cities and can cause ambulance personnel to be unavailable for real emergencies," he said. "Most New Zealanders use their common sense and get it right but there are some exceptions."
