CHILDREN making hoax calls to the ambulance service have risen during the summer holidays wasting its valuable time and resources.

False reports of car crashes, stabbings and shootings have been made over the last two days to West Midlands Ambulance Service by youngsters.

Parents are being asked to educate their children on the consequences of making hoax calls with the reminder that it could cost lives.

As well as reporting fake emergencies, call-handlers have been given a barrage of abuse by children before they hang up.

While the majority of calls are immediately identified as hoaxes by the call-handlers leading to the caller hanging up, occasionally ambulances and rapid response have been sent wasting valuable resources.

The calls have all come from children using mobile phones or phone boxes with the majority coming from Birmingham.

A West Midlands Ambulance Service spokesman said: "The calls waste a lot of our time in a variety of ways.

"The time-wasting could be the call itself and the time of the call-handler.

"Sometimes, when we do send a resource to the reported scene, there is the time wasted of that resource that could be going to someone in genuine need.

"The hoax calls can and have affected our performance by effectively taking our ambulances and rapid response vehicles off the road while they investigate something that isn’t there."

Ambulance dispatcher Lucy Parrott, based at WMAS headquarters in Brierley Hill, asked parents to make sure their children were not making calls.

Tweeting from her account, she wrote: ?"We've had lots of hoax calls the last 2 days at @officialwmas. PLEASE make sure it's not your children doing this. #hoaxcallscostlives."

"We had some hoax calls yesterday and school holidays see a rise in them. Hoax calls cost lives!!! Please make sure your children know this."