‘Hurry up or I will die’: fatal fall victim’s 999 plea as ambulance took five hours to arrive
A 94-YEAR-OLD man who died after waiting more than five hours for an ambulance following a fall warned call handlers that he would slip away unless he was seen quickly.
During three emergency calls, Kenneth Shadbolt told the call handler it would be better to send an undertaker as he feared he was dying.
An ambulance crew did not arrive at the scene until four hours after his third and final call, when paramedics found him unconscious on the floor. Mr Shadbolt
died later that day in hospital, after suffering a “very large subdural haematoma” or bleed on the brain.
The agonising wait endured by the pensioner emerged as the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch warned that unloading ambulances at busy hospitals is causing harm to patients.
The safety watchdog has been inves- tigating how long waits are delaying 999 response times across England.
Mr Shadbolt, a retired factory worker and carpenter, who lived alone in a house in Chipping Campden, Glos, fell and hit a wardrobe before collapsing on the floor shortly before 3am on the night of Mar 23 2022.
He managed to reach his mobile phone on his bedside table and rang 999. Mr Shadbolt made separate calls to South Western Ambulance Service that night, urging them to send help.
Transcripts from a coroner’s inquest show that in his final call, he can be heard desperately asking the operator: “Can you please tell them to hurry up or I shall be dead. Send me the undertaker, that would be the best bet.”
An ambulance finally got to his house at 08:10 that morning, four hours after that final call. Jerry Shadbolt, his son, said: I really do feel that if he had received immediate care he might still be out in his garden. But instead he was on his own for his last few hours.
“He must have felt so abandoned and alone on his bedroom floor. That’s the most troubling part of it for me.”
Jenny Winslade, of the South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust, has admitted that delays handing over patients to A&E, and busy hospitals, meant it was “taking us too long to get an ambulance to patients”.