Sick woman, 89, calls 111 ... and is told to phone Tesco instead

Pensioner who had been vomiting for days was later found in hospital to have blocked intestine

AN unwell 89-year-old woman told by NHS 111 to call Tesco was later admitted to hospital with a blocked intestine, it has emerged.

Julia Jago, from Ashford, Kent, had been vomiting brown liquid and was unable to keep food down for days.

But after she answered a series of questions, the NHS line only gave her a telephone number to call, which it claimed was for a pharmacy.

And when her daughter, Sally Jones,

‘She needed to go on a drip. She was dehydrated. She would have died if she hadn’t gone in’

did an internet search, it came up as Tesco’s customer service number.

Mrs Jones told The Sunday Telegraph she then found the correct number for the local supermarket pharmacy, who advised her to give her mother “sips of water”.

Instead, she took her mother to A&E, where she was immediately put on a drip and has remained in hospital since.

Mrs Jones said her mother’s experience with NHS 111 was both “horrifying” and “farcical”.

“If I hadn’t got my wits about me to take her in, somebody wouldn’t have done it, and she would have been, I don’t know, that’s just unforgivable,” she said. “She needed to go on a drip, she was dehydrated … eventually she would have died if she hadn’t gone in.”

A recent study found thousands of patients told to self-care or see their GP by NHS 111 were admitted to hospital after turning up on their own accord. It claimed the 111 triaging system may be “systematically misclassifying the urgency of patient healthcare issues”.

Mrs Jago spent four days in A&E at the William Harvey Hospital, Ashford, as there was no ward bed available. It took a week for her to get an endoscopy to establish the cause of her sickness.

Eventually, it was discovered a stent in her intestine had become dislodged, causing a blockage. She is now being given nutrition and fluids intravenously to build up her strength before she can have surgery to fix it.

“In all that time she was given no food,” Mrs Jones said. “She hasn’t eaten for two weeks… a week of that she’s been in hospital. She can’t stand up, she’s so weak.”

Mrs Jones said she cannot fault the staff at the hospital. But she added: “It is super-stressful when you’ve got a sick mother, but when the NHS does not help you it is doubly stressful.”

Sarah Shingler, chief nursing and midwifery officer at East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We’re sorry to Mrs Jago for the delay she experienced in being transferred to a ward following treatment in our emergency department, which is seeing sustained levels of high demand.

“Where there is a delay in admitting a patient to hospital, staff continuously review patient care to ensure they are safely cared for until they are admitted to an appropriate ward.”

South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust, which runs NHS 111 in the area, said: “We are sorry to hear of these concerns which we take seriously. We invite Ms Jago or her family to contact us directly so we can look into their concerns in detail.”