999 DELAYS THAT SHAME BRITAIN
Daphne, 90, in 40-HOUR wait for ambulance after breaking her hip Family forced to create shelter for 87-year-old stuck in garden overnight
A 90-yEAr- old woman with a fractured hip waited 40 hours for an ambulance – then spent the night waiting outside hospital before she could be admitted.
In the latest example of an NHS in crisis, Steven Syms told how his mother, daphne fell over at her home on Sunday evening but paramedics did not get to her until Tuesday afternoon.
She then had to remain in the ambulance overnight at royal Cornwall Hospital as there was a queue at A&E.
The widow was yesterday due to undergo an operation on her fractured hip which her son said was classed as ‘high risk’ due to her age. mr Syms, 65, a retired NHS worker from St Austell, Cornwall, said he was ‘livid’ and described the health service in the county as ‘totally broken’.
He said that when his mother was finally admitted to the hospital in Treliske, 24 ambulances remained queueing outside with no available beds for their patients.
mr Syms told the mail that it even took nine minutes for an operator to answer his emergency call on Sunday, and ‘six or seven minutes’ when he called back to find out where the ambulance was.
‘These kind of waits seem to be becoming acceptable,’ he said. ‘But they could prove to be the difference between a patient having a heart attack living or dying.’ He described his mother, a greatgrandmother of seven, as ‘fiercely independent’ before her fall at home in St Columb, near Newquay.
In another shocking case, an 87-year-old great-grandfather spent 15 hours lying overnight in the rain in his back garden in the nearby village of St Column road after a fall, with seven broken ribs, two fractures to his pelvis and an arm wound.
The pensioner’s family, who live nearby, were forced to build a makeshift shelter out of umbrellas and a neighbour’s garden football goal as they waited for paramedics to arrive on monday night. relatives dialled 999 at 7.30pm on monday but an ambulance didn’t arrive until 11.30am on Tuesday. ‘We kept ringing and they would say: “We will be with you soon,”’ said the pensioner’s son-in-law. ‘It was traumatising.’
NHS data for July showed the average ambulance wait for Category 2 calls – which include heart attack and stroke victims – surpassed 59 minutes in England for only the second time ever.
Ambulance waits for the most serious 999 calls last month hit a record high of nineand-a-half minutes. The target is seven minutes. Speaking to Cornwall Partnership Foundation Trust’s board, chief executive debbie richards said the average wait for Category 2 calls in the region was ‘hovering around the 200-minute mark’. The national target response time is 18 minutes.
A South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust spokesman said: ‘Health and social care services are under enormous pressure. We are working... to improve the service.’ A spokesman for the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly’s integrated care system urged people to ‘use the most appropriate service’ to keep emergency departments available for those in need of urgent care.