Girlfriend run off with the X Box Don't call 111

The television programme 999 What's Your Emergency? has been enlightening us recently on the brutality and banality that first responders in Blackpool have to deal with.

Broken Britain is there for all to see, with ambulance workers talking about the inevitability of having to wear stab-proof vests as violence, in particular knife attacks, increase. At the other end of the spectrum is the inanity of some of the calls the emergency service call centre gets: as one phone operator may be giving instructions on how to do CPR another is telling a caller not to ring the equivalent of 111 because your girlfriend has run off with the X-Box or you can't get the TV to work.

The volume of 999 calls in Britain has jumped by 60 per cent in the past generation, with 31 million received in 2011. Over there it seems the service has become a kind of Citizens Advice Bureau on steroids, with a bit of Bart Simpson thrown in.

There is some talk in Britain about charging for emergency calls because the services are so stretched by answering ridiculous requests among the crises.

It's safe to say the New Zealand ambulance services are a lot more prosaic.

When St John medic John Stretton noted in yesterday's paper that in 35 years in the job "there's not a lot I haven't seen", it probably wasn't the hoax calls and time wasters that first responders in the Vegas of the Northwest have to put up with.

Well, not too many anyway.

St John in Wanganui attend around 8000 call-outs, which seems a huge workload.

Fortunately for Mr Stretton and the rest of New Zealand who rely on his work and that of other ambulance officers, he says the job can bring out the best side of human nature. At least on this side of the world, the blessings still outweigh the (little) horrors.