Ordeal of 20 hours on NHS trolley for Queen’s bridesmaid
ONE of the Queen’s bridesmaids was kept waiting on an NHS hospital trolley for 20 hours after contracting life-threatening pneumonia, her daughter has claimed.
Lady Pamela Hicks, who is the daughter of Earl Mountbatten and a cousin of Prince Philip, was taken to hospital in an ambulance in the middle of the night after collapsing at her home.
But when the 88-year-old aristocrat was wheeled in, she was allegedly left on a trolley for almost a day because every bed in the hospital was being used.
Eventually, she was given a bed in the neuroscience ward because of the acute shortage of space on general wards, where pneumonia sufferers are usually treated.
Lady Pamela, a former lady-in-waiting to
‘The staff were fantastic’
the Queen, was understood to have been admitted to a hospital near her oxfordshire home towards the end of last week.
Her admittance came during the NHS winter crisis which has seen hospitals cancel up to 55,000 operations and put patients on mixed-sex wards to free space.
NHS England is worried the pressures will intensify this week when rising flu levels coincide with the effects of a cold snap. Flu rates are twice as high as this time last year and many patients are infected with an aggressive strain, h3n2, which wreaked havoc in Australia six months ago.
Lady Pamela’s daughter India Hicks, 50, blamed ‘busy’ hospitals at ‘ this time of year’ for her mother’s plight.
Writing on Instagram, the former model said her mother had to be ‘rescued’ by her 54-year- old son Ashley after collapsing at her country house, which is near the market town of Watlington. Miss Hicks, who runs a lifestyle brand, said: ‘Having the excitement of an ambulance rush her to hospital in the middle of the night, she was then kept on a gurney for 20 hours before the NHS found her an available bed in the neuroscience ward. It’s that time of year. Hospitals are busy.’
Lady Pamela, the widow of interior designer david Hicks, is understood to have been treated in hospital for three days before being discharged on Monday.
The aristocrat told the daily Mail yesterday: ‘I arrived in A&E on a busy, busy, busy night. I stayed in hospital for about three days. I’m now recovering from pneumonia at home. The NHS were brilliant. The staff were fantastic and I had wonderful care when I was in hospital.’
The NHS would not confirm which hospital she was treated in. However, oxfordshire’s neurology services are based in the John Radcliffe Hospital in oxford.
India Hicks, who is also recovering from pneumonia, flew from her home in the Bahamas to Britain when her mother became unwell.
She added: ‘My mother, being a lot stronger than most of us, had disguised her pneumonia much better than I had, living with it at home throughout Christmas till finally collapsing from a lack of oxygen, only to be rescued, brilliantly, by my brother.
‘I was recovered enough from my own share of pneumonia to fly back to England to be with her.’
Lady Pamela, who accompanied the Queen on several colonial tours, was one of her eight bridesmaids when she married Prince Philip in 1947.
She is the daughter of Lord Mountbatten, India’s last viceroy who was killed by the IRA when a bomb exploded on his fishing boat in County Sligo in 1979. The bomb also killed his grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, 14, crew member Paul Maxwell, 15, and the dowager Lady Brabourne, 83. other family members were seriously injured.
In an interview on Radio 2 last year, Lady Pamela said the only moment she struggled to cope was when she was asked to identify her father’s body at the hospital.
This is the second time that she has faced sparse NHS resources. Last summer, when she had a serious leg injury, she had to be wheeled around her local hospital on an office chair because no wheelchairs were available.