No rest for the wicked eh? I’m guessing ACH fed the Herald this one months ago and Scotland’s best known ambulance chaser, the man who heroically saved his own child with a Heimlich Maneuver just in time for the evening news, pops up, out-creepying even Uncle Anas, to tell the SNP to tell folk not to call an ambulance for a prank.
Yes, I suppose if you think there’s mileage in blaming Nicola for every damn thing that happens in Scotland, this story is no worse than many other fed to us by Anas, Dougie or Alex.
Today we read:
The Scottish Ambulance Service spent more than 70 days dealing with hoax calls in the past eight years, according to new figures.
A freedom of information request from the Scottish Lib Dems shows 1,690 hours have been spent on malicious calls since 2013-14 and 2020-21.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/19809096.scots-ambulance-service-spends-70-days-dealing-hoax-calls/
Leaving aside what the evidence of a crisis in the ambulance service might look like, as Scotland’s emergency services continue to outperform the rest, it’s the Primary School arithmetic required to make this a story that annoys.
See this:
For some reason we don’t get to see what the figures are currently looking like. They’ve had to just try to worry us with the total over 8 years from 2013-14 to 2020-2021 (the pandemic period?).
So, first, 8 years, 1 690 hours gives an average of just over 211 hours in a year but it was 286 in 2017-18 so the average was less than 200 in the other years.
It was only 88 hours in the pandemic year, no surprise there, and in 2021-22, we don’t know yet.
Are you struggling to see what the Herald thinks is worth reporting here?
When the practice peaked in 2017-18 was the service in crisis then?
The Lib Dems must have been so disappointed with the data from the FOI but the Herald have shown them how you just keeping adding up for years until you get a bigger headline-worthy number.
Finally, up to 286 hours spent dealing with hoax calls in a year? Is that big, small, something else? What percentage might that be of all the hours all the staff spend on all the other things they do?
The SAS has 5 000 staff and 1 200 volunteers. Let’s give ACH the benefit of just counting the full-timers. So, 48 weeks at 37.5 hours = 1800 hours per year? Times 5 000 staff = 9 000 000 hours.
286 is 0.003%
Try not to swear.
Talking-up Scotland / Scottish media fact checking is like shooting fish in a barrel 
“”Try not to swear””
I’m trying, I’m trying but it’s no easy.
As soon as I see 3 years, 7 years, 8 years it’s like a red flag. You just know they – choose your poison – have had to bend themselves into all sort of shapes to try to get a number to headline. You also know that the simplest division calculation will render the point they are liberally labouring meaningless.
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This is NOT scraping the bottom of the Barrel
Tis rasping the tongue off the sides of it
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‘Is that big, small, something else?’
It seems that Scotland’s opposition parties and their media allies simply will not give an answer to such a question. Their reason for omitting context and perspective? It harder and harder not to conclude that the motivation is partisan politics – anti- SG/anti-SNP/anti-independence – rather than a genuine attempt to highlight problems within public services in order to find feasible solutions.
Providing context – as done in the above TuS blog post – and perspective is actually not that difficult. And providing these things does not mean that the ‘issue’ – in this instance, the hoax calls – is not a ‘problem’ and that a solution would be welcome.
For perspective, courtesy of the GMB website from January 2020:
‘Ambulance trusts have been flooded with at least 42,000 hoax calls in just three years ..’ – from 2016/17 to 2018/19.
(https://gmb.org.uk/news/ambulance-trusts-flooded-42000-hoax-calls )
We’re told in the Herald article of 617 hoax calls in Scotland in 2017-18. At that rate over a three year period the total would be 1,851 calls.
Thus compares to the GMB’s figure based on FoI requests of at least 42,000 hoax calls in England over three years. Assuming similar proportions of ‘hoaxing’ people in each nation’s population, if ‘hoaxing’ at the same rate as Scotland, England would have had just c. 18,510 calls!
Must we face another year of gaslighting Scotland? ‘Gaslighting is dangerous because it undermines a person’s (a nation’s) sense of self-belief. If you tell someone (people) they’re wrong about things over and over, it can make them feel insecure or less confident in their point of view. Eventually, they may come to agree with the person (those) who is (are) attacking them – believing that they must be right.’ (From the Relate website – with my inserts, extrapolations from the individual to the nation.)
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It’s never a good day in Herald Land without a made up “Crisis” 🙂
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I wonder why they did not go the whole hog and declare that for 10 weeks, not a single ambulance attended a real person. SHOCKING!
Perhaps Reporting Scotland could do a feature on this, with footage of an ambulance, blue light flashing, siren wailing, heading out to YET ANOTHER hoax call out, with a really angry Connor “I’m pure bealin’” Gillies saying, enraged my, “Yet another ambulance heads out on a hoax call. This has been going on continuously for 10 weeks! We asked to speak to Humza Yusuf, but he was too busy dealing with his child’s failure to get a place in a nursery due to having a suspicious name. What exactly are this man’s priorities? Nae wunner Ahm pure ragin.”
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We have noticed the death of Desmond Tutu, I can’t recall his exact words but it was something along the likes of after 300 years of oppression we now have freedom,when can we in Scotland say the same thing as it seems we have been under the rule of Westminster oppression for as many years.
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I wonder how many hours have been taken up in dealing with the BritNats’ FOI requests, in the past eight years. It also involves having to waste precious resources, staff and hours spent on communications etc, but then the LibDem/Labour/Tory BritNats know that and it’s not their concern. As if they really care one jot about Scotland’s NHS or any other public service in Scotland. They’d have them sold off quick as a flash if they could get their dirty scheming hands on them. Scotland will never allow them to do that, so wasting money and resources will continue to be their whole reason for existing in Scotland, in order to demonise the SNP.
Well the BritNats better start looking for other jobs because when Scotland secures independence, these jobsworths will be even more surplus to requirements than they are now.
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Westminster thieves.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/544357-venezuelan-gold-guaido-supreme-court/
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Thanks I’ll have a look at that link. Presume the BritNats don’t want to hand back Venezuela’s gold that they thieved. I was just thinking about Scotland’s gold mining, oops I mean Australian gold mining in Scotland, and whether the Highlands is still being prospected for other highly sought after minerals.
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I hope you all had a good Xmas btw. I was on my tod with a whinging cat who is missing his brothers, ie, my sons, so I watched some nice films on the NLS moving image archive.
Some I watched for a second time like ‘Sorley MacLean’s Island’, from 1974. Film number 3141, all films are in COPYRIGHT but it’s worth a look and watch if you have free time at the moment. Also the one about the poet Neil Gunn, where he talks about the clearances, as well as other things, film no.0589.
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Looking at what is on offer on the TV tonight I might just have a look at the NLS archive or read a book. Decisions, decisions.
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Dear ArtyHetty,
Grateful thanks for the film recommendation. I’ve just watched ‘Sorley MacLean’s island’ – wow, wonderful, so much to take in and to reflect on how the things he talks about have turned out. (Far from all negatively!)
I enjoy delving into the National Library of Scotland’s historic map collection but have never looked into its film archive. I will be ‘delving’ into this some more!
The island of Raasay had a major, formative impact on me when a young man – and I’ve walked in Hallaig several times since. Wonderful island. Time for another visit!
(https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/3141?search_term=sorley&search_join_type=AND&search_fuzzy=yes )
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Excellent Stewart. I spent quite a bit of time making a list of films via their archive. Many are not available but you can pay for some I think. Weirdly lots of STV and ‘Scottish television’ ones are not available to watch. Particularly if they involve oil.
There are some fascinating one about industry though including a handful about oil, somany subjects and genres to peruse.
Remember they are in copyright, which it’s why I just recommend interesting films that I like, giving the catalogue number.
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