Welford woman drives elderly neighbour to hospital after ambulance delay
A LIFE and death emergency saw a Welford woman drive her elderly neighbour to hospital during a heart attack after she was told an ambulance could take seven hours to arrive.
Jane Thomas, aged 59, drove her neighbour - Derek Mosson, 81, - to Warwick Hospital after he suffered a heart attack on Thursday 4th April and he contacted Jane in desperate need of medical help.
“Derek said to me ‘I can feel myself going’ and he was in so much pain,” Jane told the Herald. “As we are neighbours, I pop in and see him every day to make sure he’s all right so when he was having the heart attack, I called an ambulance and was told there was a seven hour wait. I said this is an emergency and I asked what was considered a priority and the operator replied it would be a priority if the patient was having breathing difficulties. I said he can’t breathe now and asked what’s more important than a heart attack? I felt so much pressure because his life was now in my hands.”
Jane added the operator asked too many questions which she can’t even remember what they were because there was so many of them and Derek couldn’t answer them because he was in so much pain.
“It was unbelievable and so I decided to drive Derek to hospital with another neighbour called Pam. He was holding a bowl in case he was sick on the way and we just kept saying to him, ‘stay with us – stay with us’ as the journey took 30 minutes to get from Welford and to Warwick and we got stuck behind lorries. When we got to the hospital it was a nightmare because there was the hassle of parking so Pam got out the car and went into the hospital to tell staff about Derek’s heart attack. The staff were excellent and got him into a wheelchair and took him inside,” Jane said.
In addition to the trauma of Derek’s lifesaving mercy dash to get medical help, Jane was left distressed by the actual location of Warwick Hospital which is the same place where her husband, Michael, died 18 months ago from breathing difficulties aged 66.
Derek was transferred from Warwick to Walsgrave Hospital where his stent needed replacing and he returned to his home in Welford on Saturday 6th April in the evening.
“When we got Derek to A&E at Warwick I was impressed with the service and everything was amazing but I had to save my neighbour’s life because the ambulance was going to be 7 hours which was an absolute disgrace. If we’d waited that long Derek would have been dead. The system failed him,” Jane said.
She made a formal complaint the following day, Friday.
West Midlands Ambulance Service said it had the calls listened to and double checked, and the caller was told an ambulance ‘may be several hours’, rather than being told it would be seven hours.
A West Midlands Ambulance Service spokesman said: “Unfortunately, due to long hospital handover delays, there are occasions when we are not able to get to patients as quickly as we would want to, for which we apologise.
“We rely on each part of the health and social care system working together, so that our ambulances can get to patients in the community quicker. If our crews are left caring for patients outside hospital, they are not available to respond to the next call as quickly as we would all want.
“During the first 999 call, which was received at 2.30pm, Ms Thomas was advised that it may be ‘several’ hours before we were able to respond. We have taken the difficult decision to let callers know how long it might be before an ambulance was available based on feedback from serious incidents, patient feedback and comments from groups such as Healthwatch.
“An ambulance was dispatched to the incident at 3.01pm, at the same time we received a second 999 call advising an ambulance was no longer required as Ms Thomas was transporting the patient to hospital. At this point the ambulance was stood down.”
Latest figures released as part of NHS England’s Ambulance Quality Indicators data has shown that in March the trust took an average of 33 minutes and one second to respond to category 2 incidents, such as heart attacks. In that month it dealt with 44,182 such calls.
