By Cathal McGuigan
The NI Ambulance Service (NIAS) has dealt with 450 potential hoax 999 calls from County Derry since December 2015, including calls about overdoses, drowning and suicide attempts.
The figures have been revealed in response to an FOI request from the County Derry Post.
NIAS stressed that the calls met their criteria for potential hoax calls and added that in some cases they cannot confirm if the call was a valid hoax or not.
The NIAS dealt with 64 calls from County Derry which were obvious hoax calls, while a caller hung up or the call was terminated before enough information could be collected on 23 occasions.
The figures show that the Ambulance Service responded to 328 of the calls. The incidents were later deemed to be hoax calls, as potential patients were found to have left the scene on 56 occasions, while there were 137 cases where an ambulance crew arrived but found no patient requiring treatment and 117 occasions where ambulance crew could not locate any medical emergency.
The FOI response shows that the most common complaints given in the 999 calls were for assault or sexual assault (51), falls (35) and overdose/poisoning (27).
There were also nine occasions where ambulance crews responded to potential hoax calls about burns or explosions and 23 potential hoax calls concerning psychiatric issues, ‘abnormal behaviour’ or a suicide attempt.
The majority of calls believed to be hoaxes in County Derry came from the BT48 postcode area of Derry City, with 147 calls.
This was followed by 52 calls made from the BT47 area, covering the Waterside but also areas including Dungiven, Eglinton and Claudy. Among the most common reports were calls concerning falls, or a patient having fainted or been found unconscious.
Forty potential hoax calls were recorded as coming from the BT52 area, covering Coleraine, most of which were concerned with assault or sexual assault. This was followed by BT49 (Limavady, Ballykelly) with 26 calls, BT45 (Magherafelt, Draperstown) with 23, BT51 (Coleraine, Castlerock) with 17, BT55 (Portstewart) with 11 and lastly BT46 (Maghera, Swatragh) with 10.
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