Help!

Plea on the news for people to think twice before dialing 999 for non-emergency matters, particularly over the holiday period. Perfectly reasonable, but the problem is, who decides what is an emergency? There's a lot of "being wise after the event" here, with examples being quoted of people ringing 999 about things which turned out to be trivial, but the point is that, at the time, those people didn't know whether it was trivial or an emergency, so they played safe and contacted 999. They, after all, are the experts - your average man in the street is not medically qualified. I think the emergency services need to remember this.