St John has revealed that just under 16,000 calls were made last week to 111 as it prepares for another busy day due to seasonal illnesses.
Yesterday the ambulance service declared a major incident response and activated its emergency operations centre for the first time since Covid-19, citing extreme pressure from seasonal illness.
Saturday was St John's busiest day on record, receiving 2562 calls through 111, a 34% increase on a typical day. The service's daily calls record was also broken three times last week.
Doug Gallagher told Breakfast that activating a major incident response meant the organisation had "a whole lot more levers that we can pull to manage the demand".
"It means that we set up an emergency operations centre. We get senior managers in. We have an incident controller. We connect up with health, so we have Health New Zealand come in as well," he explained.
He said it had been "quite a mild winter", before a cold snap last week caused temperatures to plummet, electricity use to soar, and the number of winter illness-related calls to rise sharply.
"It hasn't abated. And in fact, you know, we can report this morning that just under 16,000 calls to 111 last week, which is over 1000 more than our next busiest week, which was the previous week," he said.
He said winter exacerbates respiratory illnesses, which puts "pressure on the whole of the health system".
"And sometimes, when people have difficulty accessing other parts of the health system, they go to us because you know we do answer the phone within 10 seconds most of the time, so we're highly accessible."
Gallagher said he was pleased with how the organisation has coped with the high demand so far, however he said there had been "some quite extensive delays" for patients with moderate problems.
"We're really happy with how the system is held up overall, in that we've got to our our sickest patients in good times. Where the pressure is those patients with more moderate problems, such as they've fallen, they have non-life-threatening pain, or a broken bone, or something like that. That's where there's been some quite extensive delays," he said.
Gallagher added that the service had "great resilience".
"We just work from shift to shift, from hour to hour, and so the resilience is there. I think the depth is there for us to continue.
"Clearly more resource is always better, and we could do more. But you know, just really happy that we are getting to those sickest patients in in good time."
In a statement yesterday, Te Whatu Ora Health NZ said there was "no immediate evidence" that emergency departments or ward capacity had been impacted by the higher than usual ambulance demand.
"Our Emergency Departments are also busy as usual at this time of year, but there is no immediate evidence that ED or ward capacity has been impacted by higher than usual ambulance demand, including at Middlemore."
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