If the ambulance doesn’t get here soon, you’d better send me an undertaker instead
With stoic humour, those were among the last words of 94-year-old Kenneth as he lay stricken for FIVE HOURS. Now his grieving family demand: how COULD this happen?
DURING the small hours of a March morning earlier this year, Grahame Shadbolt was startled awake by the insistent trilling of his telephone. On the line was his elderly father Kenneth, who had fallen on his way to the bathroom and couldn’t get up. ‘He had called an ambulance and was insistent there was nothing to worry about,’ Grahame recalls. ‘He was resolute I must not come.’
Retired marine engineer Grahame, 66, lives in Hampshire, a two-hour drive away from his father’s home in the Cotswold village of Chipping Campden.
After fighting the instinct to immediately get into his car, Grahame decided against it, consoling himself that an ambulance would get to his 94-year- old father far more quickly than he could.
‘It’s now my greatest regret,’ he says. Why? Because an ambulance did not turn up for five hours.
By the time it did arrive at the end-of-terrace home where his father lived alone, Kenneth — who had called 999 on a further two occasions in mounting anxiety — was unconscious. He died not long afterwards in hospital.
For his grieving sons, their loss is now compounded by the knowledge that their father died alone, in pain, and increasingly aware that help was not going to come in time — something underlined in the transcripts of his final calls which they demanded to see to unravel his last hours. They make for distressing reading. By the time of the third call, more than an hour after the first, Kenneth complains of feeling ‘awful sick’ and, with the black humour typical of that most stoic of generations, suggests that an ambulance may no longer be necessary. ‘Can you please tell them to hurry up or I shall be dead,’ he pleads with the dispatcher. ‘Send me the undertaker, that would be the best bet.’
Poignantly — and presciently — they were among his last words. ‘That was Dad,’ Grahame’s twin brother Jerry told the Mail this week. ‘He would never kick up a fuss. But, even though he wasn’t complaining, he was clearly saying
I need your help. He was alone, increasingly distressed, and vulnerable. He had every reason to expect an ambulance in good time.
‘That it didn’t come shames our health service.’
Younger brother Russell, 64, a retired civil servant from Bristol, adds: ‘It’s bad enough to lose your loved one but to think of Dad lying on the floor injured and frightened is so very hard. We were brought up that you go to work, pay your taxes, and you have faith in the NHS to be there when you need it.
But it wasn’t.’
The Shadbolts’ experience holds a chilling light to the devastating toll of the increase in ambulance call out times in recent months.
In England, the average response for a Category 2 emergency — the category under which Kenneth was triaged — was almost 40 minutes in May, more than double the 18-minute target. The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch has said that the delays are causing harm to patients daily.
Meanwhile, there are real people like Kenneth, a father of five, grandfather of six and great grandfather of one, whose loss is keenly felt. Like many of his era, he lived in the same village his whole life and died in the home where he had raised his five sons with wife Claudine, whom he met at a Butlin’s holiday camp and married in 1951.
A farm labourer, Kenneth began working in a factory after his children came along: five sons in the space of seven years meant a labourer’s wage no longer sufficed.
‘He hated it,’ says Jerry, a consultant in West London. ‘He’d gone from working outdoors to being among noisy machinery which caused lifelong migraines.’
Older sons Simon and Nigel were followed by twins, then youngest son Russell. Sadly, tragedy struck in 1967 when Nigel died aged just 16 from kidney problems. ‘It’s a burden my dad carried all his life. He never got over it,’ says Jerry.
Later in life, however, once his sons had left home, Kenneth was able to spend the last part of his working life as a carpenter. ‘He loved it,’ says Jerry.
He and Claudine also enjoyed coach holidays until she started to suffer from the dementia that led to her death aged 84 in 2016, leaving Kenneth a widower.
Further tragedy came in the form of Simon’s death from cancer in 2018, while only in his mid-60s.
Nonetheless, Kenneth was not one for self-pity and while he did not like living alone, he was resolutely independent.
In good health for a man his age, in 2020 he was given a new lease of life after his sons got him an electric tricycle on which he routinely took ten-mile trips in the countryside. ‘It changed his life,’ says Grahame. ‘He loved getting out on that bike. He’d lost weight, he seemed fitter.’
His surviving sons visited regularly, meaning he had company most weekends. ‘We did different things: we used to enjoy a pub lunch together, Grahame and his wife would often cook for him and Russell would take him on his errands,’ says Jerry.
A source of sadness for Russell is that he hadn’t seen his father since last September, following surgery that confined him to his home. ‘We had a longstanding arrangement that when I was able to travel, we’d go out for a beer and steak at a local pub,’ he recalls. ‘I was due to go a couple of weeks before he died, but then I got Covid.’
All of Kenneth’s sons acknowledge their father’s advanced