Patients faced two-day wait for an ambulance
FOUR patients in Wales waited more than two days for an ambulance as the service was gripped by its worst winter crisis for years, new figures have revealed.
Wales had the longest delays in ambulances reaching patients of any trust in the UK in the last year, data released under Freedom of Information law has revealed.
One Welsh patient ended up waiting 62 hours and three minutes – a total of two and a half days – for a for a crew to arrive at the scene, but the Welsh Ambulance Service has stressed that the call was not deemed immediately lifethreatening.
The figures were reflected in the scores of stories reported by news organisations around Wales as the winter crisis hit.
At the time, staff told us that ‘a catastrophic crisis’ had hit the service.
And at its worst, as huge queues of ambulances waited outside full hospitals in different parts of Wales, the service was forced to go to its highest level of response – known as REAP four. Senior managers with training were drafted to drive ambulances.
Some of the stories we reported included a pensioner with a broken hip who waited 10 hours for an ambulance and then four hours on a trolley in A&E.
A 10-year-old girl with face and leg injuries had to wait four hours in the rain after falling down concrete steps. And other emergency services had to step in. Firefighter took blankets to crash victims and police ferried injured people to hospital .
John Williams, 80, needed the attention of paramedics after hitting his head on the kitchen floor at his home in Gowerton, Swansea, in April.
But the Welsh Ambulance Service arrived 23 hours after the initial 999 call, with the pensioner then forced to wait a further seven hours outside Morriston Hospital before being admitted onto a ward.
Following the delays John, who fell again in hospital, died just four days after the initial incident.
His son Darren Williams said: “He was 11 hours on the kitchen floor and he did not have his medication for 36 hours.
“I knew he was 80, but I expected him to come home.
“The night before he died I was helping him to have his food, I did not expect it.
“The next morning, he was gone.” In response, the Welsh Ambulance Service admitted the difficult winter period contributed to some of the longer delays.
But a spokeswoman said the raw data was not a fair reflection of the service being provided by the trust.
“This is a case of the data not telling the full story. The challenges of the 2017-18 winter across the whole NHS system are well documented and we fully accept that a number of patients waited far longer than anyone would like,” she said.
“Similarly, we fully understand how distressing any wait for assistance can be.
“That said, these figures represent the extreme end of the waiting time spectrum and are neither typical nor do they explain the circumstances of these individual cases.”
She added: “At the Welsh Ambulance Service, we take the care of our patients extremely seriously and have looked in detail at each of the cases to which these data refer.
“Many of these are cases which involved hospital transfers where patients were safely in the care of medical teams. In other cases, extreme weather conditions had an inevitable impact on response times, but the majority of patients received support and advice from our clinical contact centre staff and clinicians in the interim.
“We continue to work hard to deliver the best possible service to our patients and, while recognising that there is always more to do, we would like to reassure the public that cases with waits of this magnitude are highly unusual and are generally the result of a specific set of circumstances which is not always evident from the raw data.”
The data also showed that the total number of calls received by ambulance services had risen by 15% between 2015 and 2017.