Long wait for ambulance sparks fears over 999 cover
AN 81-year-old grandmother waited more than two-and-a-half hours for an ambulance to arrive after she fell onto a concrete floor, suffering head injuries.
Jeanette Turpin, of Clifton, tripped over a step while walking into her garage and fell face-down, injuring her arm, leg, shoulder and head, shortly before 2pm on a Sunday – and it took until after 5pm before she was checked in at Royal Derby Hospital.
Mrs Turpin, who fell last month and is now recovering from her severe bruising at home, says she worries her ordeal suggests the town is not adequately covered by the emergency services and she has since made a formal complaint to East Midlands Ambulance Service, outlining her concerns.
She told the News Telegraph: “I’ve been in the house 20 years and I managed to fall flat on my face walking into the garage.
“There was nobody about, I had no phone with me, but I managed to pull myself up on the car, which was alongside me, and got back in the house and called 999. I sat in the kitchen and called my daughter and my neighbour. Then I went into shock.
“I was very lucky not to have broken anything. But I was quite badly injured. It didn’t break the skin, but it could have been a cracked skull. I had quite a severe head injury.
“It was very frightening and distressing. You just sit there in shock and you wait. You’re not aware of time, as a patient, but it was very worrying.”
Mrs Turpin was waiting alongside her daughter, Carolyn Wright, and her neighbour, who had both rushed to help. Her daughter called 999 several times for updates on where the ambulance was, but was apparently not given an estimated time of arrival.
Doctors checked over Mrs Turpin shortly after she arrived at the hospital and found she had a suspected broken shoulder, a cut to her leg and bruising along her arm and wrist. She was sent in for a CT scan and X-rays, and fortunately was found to have no bleeding on her brain.
She was offered the chance to stay in overnight, but left at midnight and returned the following day for a further X-ray which found her shoulder had not broken.
She said: “I suppose I was very lucky that nothing was broken and my injuries weren’t more severe.
“But we didn’t know that at the time and I think I should have been seen quicker than three hours. It took four phone calls by my daughter to get that. Then we tried 111, because we thought of getting ourselves to hos- pital but they advised against that because of my head injury.
“This was a Sunday afternoon and there was a four-hour wait at A&E. All the staff were lovely but I decided I would be in quicker if I went in by ambulance.
“I was there until midnight, from 5pm when we turned up, and they said they’d had 12 ambulances turn up all at once before I came – and this is a Sunday afternoon, it’s unbelievable.”
East Midlands Ambulance Service told the News Telegraph a Clinical Assessment Team of nurses and paramedics provided medical support over the phone until the ambulance arrived at 4.42pm, after receiving the call at 2.03pm. Mrs Turpin’s 999 call was initially categorised as Category Three, which means an urgent emergency but one which is not life threatening. This means priority is given to Category One and Category Two emergencies.
Samantha Westwell, ambulance operations manager for Derbyshire, said: “We are sorry we were unable to get to Mrs Turpin sooner on this occasion due to a high demand on the service, and we recognise the discomfort that this will have caused.
“Every 999 call is assessed based on the information we are given and while we aim to get to all patients as quickly as possible, those experiencing a life-threatening emergency such as cardiac arrest or breathing difficulties have to be seen first.
“We are currently working with Mrs Turpin and her family to fully investigate the delay she experienced and we will respond as soon as possible.”
East Midlands Ambulance Service has also said it is working to improve response times with a £9 million additional investment in the service this year. This is expected to fund extra clinical staff, ambulances and other resources to enable EMAS to respond “more quickly and more consistently” to 999 calls and urgent GP requests for ambulances.
From this month, the service will begin the training of an additional 200 frontline staff who will help patients across the region once qualified.