Phil Schofield outraged at prank calls to 999 – like a woman wanting egg advice

This Morning’s Phillip Schofield was utterly outraged by stories from paramedics about prank calls and the terrible way they have been treated on their duties.

He, alongside stand-in host Rochelle Humes, spoke to two paramedics, Paul Turner and Martin Berry, who revealed times they have been folled into taking someone to hospital because they "needed a lift" while others instances of prank callers asking for advice about their broken eggs.

Phil and Rochelle were appalled, especially by a statistic which showed more than 8,300 calls to 999 over the course of a year were made by just five people who regularly ring back.

There was first a phone call played, called a "nuisance" call, where a woman asked for some advice.

She said: "I’ve got a box of eggs in the fridge, one of them was cracked and I moved the eggs and they’ve been open in the fridge overnight.

"Can you keep a box of eggs open in the fridge?"

The person taking the call was completely flummoxed, telling her she is not the person to speak to about her eggs.

Rochelle called it "shocking," before Paul then told a story of a similar thing which has happened to him.

He said: "There’re loads of scenarios – that’s just one of many calls where they don’t require an emergency response at all.

"One of the calls that happened to us – we picked up this gentleman in the middle of town centre. He was rollin around in loads, and loads of pain.

"I treated him as I believed he was in pain, that’s my job, then we got up to the local hospital: thumbs up, jumps out of the ambulance and says, ‘Thanks for the lift.’

"And you know that happens, I would say quite often people call ambulances because they don’t really know or there’s no one else to turn to so everything gets dropped back to the ambulance service."

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Martin went on to suggest some of the callers they get are from "vulnerable" people who do not know where to turn, and ore funding needs to be given to help those people to make the service more efficient.

He said fining nuisance callers was not the way to go, as many of them could be vulnerable and need to be supported in the social care system.

Phil and Rochelle were shocked at the stats around this, for example about the five people that regularly call the ambulance service, as well at the £19million that is wasted on these calls.

This Morning airs weekdays at 10.30am on ITV.

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