Crisis NHS boss driven to A&E after stroke because of ambulance delay fears
AGLOUCESTERSHIRE health boss has said she is “grateful” she didn’t have to call an ambulance after suffering a stroke.
Deborah Lee is the chief executive of the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and travelled to A&E by car after becoming ill on April 22.
From there, she was whisked through a CT scanner, given “clot-busting” drugs and taken to Oxford for a thrombectomy.
Ms Lee praised the “pace, expertise and kindness” of the NHS staff she met along the way, but also reflected on what could have happened.
In short, she could have waited several hours for an ambulance – but, after previously hearing his wife “lament” the delays affecting the service, Ms Lee’s husband drove her straight to the hospital himself where she received prompt treatment. In a post on Twitter, the health boss imagined a very different scenario.
She wrote: “On Friday I had a bit of a ‘turn’ – lopsided and unable to speak. Having heard me lamenting ambulance delays, my husband bundled me into his car and drove me to A&E.
“I was taken into resus and 35 minutes later I was in a CT scanner, 30 minutes later a bolus of TPA was on board and I was winging my way to Oxford for a thrombectomy. From start to finish, the NHS served me with pace, expertise and kindness.”
Ms Lee penned the reflective Twitter thread from a cafe and said: “Naturally, I am eternally grateful to my husband for his swift actions, to all the NHS staff that I came across, to those who invented clot busting drugs but I can’t get one thing out of my head. What if my husband hadn’t been there and my daughter had called for an ambulance and I’d been put in the Cat 2 ‘stack’?
“Through no fault of its own, the SW [South West] has the worst ambulances handover delays of any region; my system is working unrelentingly to solve this but to no great avail. The problem isn’t the front door of hospitals, it’s the back. It’s a complete lack of flow, with no silver bullet and I don’t have the answer, but the Government has the power to generate one.
“Starting with an overhaul of social care – training, development, pay reform and the professionalisation of care workers to build a sector that people want to join, stay in and feel proud to belong to. Care built in communities, around people’s own homes and, not just for when they’ve crumpled and ended up in hospital but truly preventative care. Thankfully I won’t be needing social care either but I so very nearly might have...”
Following Ms Lee’s Twitter thread, deputy clinical chair of NHS Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group, Dr Hein Le Roux, said: “We are determined to provide the best possible advice, care and treatment for everyone who uses our services.
“One Gloucestershire health and care partners are working more closely than ever before to ensure the journey in and out of hospital is as smooth as it can be. A whole raft of measures have been put in place to improve access, help ensure people are able to leave hospital when safe to do so with ongoing care support if needed and improve ambulance handover arrangements.
“It’s this spirit of partnership working that will ensure further improvements are made, acknowledging that many of the challenges facing urgent and emergency care can only be overcome by working together and are a shared responsibility.”
What if my husband hadn’t been there and my daughter had called for an ambulance and I’d been put in the Cat 2 ‘stack’? Deborah Lee