Hospital took 11 hours to see dying man,67

A TERMINALLY- ILL man waited 11 hours – including a four-hour spell on a trolley – for treatment at Scotland’s new ‘super hospital’.

Robert Argo, 67, waited seven hours for an ambulance to take him from the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice to the South Glasgow University Hospital – then a further four hours in a corridor.

After the ambulance was initially called at 6.20pm on Monday, it wasn’t until 6am the following day that leukaemia sufferer Mr Argo was finally admitted. A spokesman f or the hospital said he had been given a bed ‘as soon as one became available’.

But his daughter Susan Albert said: ‘I am really disgusted. It’s a terrible way to treat people, whether they’ve got cancer or not. He wasn’t the only one in the corridor. There were three people sitting facing reception, two in wheelchairs and another on a trolley.’

Mrs Albert, 44, said she had been at the hospice with her father all afternoon with her mother, son Alan and brother Robert – but left when the ambulance was called and drove to the hospital to meet him when he arrived. However, the hours ticked by with no sign of her father. She said: ‘The hospice said they had called back three times to ask where the ambulance was. I spoke to an ambulance driver, who told me to go in and ask at the desk. She said she had to talk to the nurse and ask them to upgrade the ambulance.’

The ambulance arrived shortly before 1.30am, but the former BAE systems worker’s ordeal was far from over. Mrs Albert said he was taken into triage before being put in a corridor to wait for a bed at 2.15am, adding: ‘He wasn’t quite with it; he hadn’t been sleeping during the day and he didn’t say much. He was lying on the trolley on oxygen, with no pain relief.

‘My son asked how long it would be before he got a room and they said there were nine in front of him.’

Mr Argo was finally admitted just before 6am.

A Scottish Ambulance Service spokesman said: ‘A number of attempts to dispatch an available crew were made, but ambulances had to be prioritised to respond to emergency demand. We maintained contact with the hospice to ensure the patient’s condition did not worsen and are sorry for any discomfort they may have experienced as a result of the wait.’

A spokesman for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said merging three hospitals had created ‘ some challenges’, adding: ‘This has led to some patients waiting longer than we would have wished.’

A spokesman f or the hospice declined to comment.

‘He was lying on the trolley on oxygen’