My last hours with him’

him, as the operator should have asked my mum to wake my dad, as my mum thought he was asleep.

“At that point, if my mum hadn’t been able to wake him, the ambulance would’ve been sent ASAP.”

She added: “EMAS have said lessons have been learnt, but that is too late now for my dad.”

Speaking after Eric’s death, his widow Linda said: “We daren’t go to bed in case the ambulance arrived, so we sat in the living room. I’ll never forget Eric’s last words to me. He said: ‘You want to get your head down, you look tired, have a sleep. I’m going to sleep.’

“I thought he was just sleeping, but when the ambulance men arrived they said he’d passed away.

“It wasn’t his time. We will never know if the paramedics coming would have made a difference.

“Whatever the outcome would have been, it’s not on leaving someone waiting for 13 hours. I had no idea those few hours before would be the last I spent with him.”

EMAS has apologised to the family for the “level of service they received” and said it plans to invest £9million this year in 200 more frontline staff and new ambulances.

It also launched an Urgent Care Transport Service last April. This has helped cut the average wait for an urgent transfer to hospital from 10 hours, 43 minutes to four hours, 10 minutes. The target is four hours.