Where’s the ambulance?
Last words of dying grandmother with serious head injury who had waited an HOUR for paramedics
‘They let us down massively’
A GRANDMOTHER’S last words before she died were ‘Where’s the ambulance?’ – as she waited an hour for paramedics to arrive.
Lynda Manning, 68, was at her daughter’s birthday party when she fell and injured her head.
Her family rang 999 but did not notice that her head was bleeding, meaning the call was not treated as life-threatening. They were told that paramedics would get to the pensioner as soon as possible – but on a busy Saturday night crews were dealing with a high number of call-outs.
Her daughter Paula, 46, held her head in her hands as she lay dying on the pavement in Swindon on the evening of September 28. She said: ‘It was late at night, it was dark and we couldn’t see the blood.
‘My mother’s last words to me were, “Why is no one coming to help me? Where’s the ambulance? My head hurts”.’ Mrs Manning’s husband, Richard, 69, had seen her fall but was unable to help her because he was on crutches. After an hour waiting in vain for the ambulance to arrive, the family decided to drive to Great West- ern Hospital. The grandmother, whose second daughter, Debbie is 44, was then taken by ambulance to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where she died five days later. Miss Manning said the bleed was so bad that her mother, a recently retired shop assistant at Homebase, was brain-dead before she eventually received medical help.
‘She was already dead by the time she got to hospital,’ she said. She criticised the ambulance service, saying: ‘Don’t rely on them.
‘Take matters into your own hands. What’s the point in calling them? They let us down massively.’
A spokesman for South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) said: ‘On this particular day, demand for the 999 ambulance service in Swindon was extremely high and we were dealing with a 6 per cent increase in incidents compared to 2016. ‘We will always clinically triage those patients most in need of an ambulance who are in a life-threatening, time- critical situation.
‘When demand is very high SWASFT staff and volunteers will be doing everything they can to attend as many incidents as possible in order of clinical priority. The initial call we received confirmed that the patient had fallen and had a wrist and a head injury and that the patient was alert and breathing and conscious.
‘ Four further calls were received and the patient’s condition had not deteriorated.’