St John is getting many more 111 calls than it usually expects at this time of year, putting the ambulance service under immense strain.
Photo: St John
St John said winter demand had come six weeks earlier than expected, with Auckland paramedics facing the most pressure.
Deputy chief executive Dan Ohs said the high volume of emergency calls was affecting response times.
"Right now we're receiving 14 percent more triple-ones than we would anticipate for our upper limit at this time of year. That's translating to 10 percent additional demand on our ambulance staff in terms of response," he said.
"The majority of patients who have an urgent condition we're attending to within 15 minutes, we would like that to be much closer to eight minutes.
"The majority of patients are still getting a response time fast, we would like to do better."
Watch Dan Ohs brief the media on the ambulance response:
St John has 100 ambulance staff off sick with Covid-19, other illnesses, or caring for dependants, every day.
Ohs said an ambulance would always be sent in a life-threatening emergency, but people whose cases were not urgent could first expect a phone call from a paramedic or a nurse.
If the problem could not be resolved over the phone, Ohs warned people to expect delays, with some patients in non-urgent cases waiting up to 14 hours over the last week.
"Those incidents are incidents I would emphasise [that] are not life-threatening - that example of a 14-hour incident was a request for transport from a GP - but 14 hours is much longer than we would like to keep people waiting in the community," Ohs said.
He said people with broken legs or hips should not expect extended waits for help.
"I'm talking about people who call us because they have been to their GP and they're frustrated that their antibiotics are not working immediately for them. I'm talking about people who are calling us because they have run out of paracetamol. I'm talking about people who have called us because they don't have transport to the GP to get their stitches removed," he said.
St John said there were five fewer ambulances on the road in Auckland on 14 May than it would have liked.
Ohs said full hospitals caused delays in off-loading patients in ambulance bays while staff found somewhere for them to go, but St John had plans with hospitals to manage the problem.
If it is not a genuine emergency, people are being urged to call their GP or Heathline for advice.
St John said long-term staff vacancies had been cut from 185 to 120 over the last six months, but that meant the ambulance service was still 120 people short of its "baseline".