More than 7000 hoax calls have been made to the Scottish Ambulance Service in the past three years, it has emerged.
The response to a Freedom of Information request showed a total of 7057 hoax calls had been made to the service since 2009.
Nearly half of the calls resulted in the use of ambulance resources, while 2678 were attended by staff.
MSP Alison McInnes, health spokeswoman for the Liberal Democrats, who obtained the figures, branded the calls "wasteful and thoughtless" and called on the Scottish Government to highlight the negative impact they can have.
She said: "7000 hoax calls in three years are no joke for Scotland's emergency services. Each and every hoax call must be answered by an emergency dispatch centre. It's an extraordinary waste of our emergency services' time and resources.
"At a time when NHS resources are already stretched to the limits, many people will be disappointed to learn that each year the Scottish Ambulance Service has to attend nearly a thousand hoax call-outs (per year).
"Malicious hoax calls are irresponsible and dangerous as they can divert resources from genuine emergencies.
"It is all of our responsibility to make it clear to society that putting people's lives at risk is no joke.
"The Scottish Government must also tackle this by launching a broad public awareness campaign."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article