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Guernsey’s emergency ambulance service appears to be getting busier and busier with 2019 being described as its "busiest year ever" after previously saying both 2018 and 2017 were also incredibly busy.
The blue light service was called out to 5658 incidents last year.
That is only up 2.5% on the previous 12 months, but St John says it "represents a significant increase in demand over the past five years with a twenty-five per cent increase since 2014".
Pictured: One of Guernsey's St John ambulances out on a shout.
Breaking 2019 down, May was the busiest month with almost six hundred cases in total, and 21 incidents on one day alone, which is almost double the daily average for the service.
St John says it also saw some busy episodes during the autumn and over the Christmas and New Year period, with a peak of twenty-eight calls on a single day in September and twenty-five calls on one day in December.
During these exceptionally busy periods, off-duty staff are called back into work to "maintain resilience and senior officers have been deployed to back up crews on emergency calls".
Chief Ambulance Officer Mark Mapp said:
“Although overall the increase year-on-year is only small, the figures show a continuing trend of growth. The service has experienced some periods of high demand with as many as twenty-nine cases in a single day, which demonstrates the dynamic and unpredictable nature of ambulance work. I am very grateful for the commitment and flexibility of the team, especially those clinicians who have made themselves available to return to work when they are off-duty to provide care and treatment for patients in their time of need.”
During 2019 staff from the emergency ambulance service were also deployed to Sark to provide cover for the island doctor and to Alderney to provide emergency cover for the Alderney Ambulance Service.
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