London Defender

The Daily Mirror of the Great Britain

QT audience member shares horror experience after waiting ‘hours but ambulance never came’

A BBC QT audience member “waited for hours” for an ambulance that “never came” to take his three-year-old daughter, who had an epileptic seizure, to the hospital. 

He explained how the family was left baffled after they couldn’t get an ambulance even after waiting for “fair” hours.

He told the panel: “In May last year my three-year-old daughter had a first epileptic seizure.

“We called 999 and the call handler was excellent but you got the feeling that they couldn’t understand why we were waiting for so long.

“The first instinct as a parent was to take her in the car and take to the hospital.

“However, being told that ‘don’t do it because if anything happens on the way, you had to bear it’ to the few hours later being told ‘we are not going to get to you, take her yourself’, to then where she subsequently had a second seizure in the local hospital.

“At no point do I blame the ambulance crews…to be honest with you, they’re heroes.

“But it was awful. It’s a case of not losing trust but losing faith.”

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This figure was one-third of the 77,054 arrivals by ambulance.

At the beginning of December 2021 the figure was 23 percent, rising to 27 percent at the start of April this year.

NHS trusts are meant to complete 95 percent of all ambulance handovers within 30 minutes, with 100 percent within 60 minutes.

Some 11,389 ambulance patients waited more than an hour to be passed to A&E teams, compared with 10,020 the previous week.