Gran's agonising five-and-a-half hour wait for ambulance
Despite calling for urgent help for her 91-year-old grandmother, a heavily pregnant woman had to face an agonising five-and-a-half hours wait for medics to turn up at the house in St John’s Chapel. (May 16 edition)Debra Thomson first called the out of hours emergency service at 8.30pm on Saturday night after finding her grandmother, Adelaide Habberjam, collapsed on the floor of her home in the rural Weardale town.
However, despite numerous phone calls to the locum doctor, and the out of hours service, nobody turned up to see Mrs Habberjam, who suffers from angina and fluid on the legs, until 2am on Sunday.
Miss Thomson said: “My nana hadn’t been well for a few days so I’d gone round to lock up for her but when I got in I found her on the floor, with her head on the chair in tears – it was awful. “I didn’t know what to do, and I can’t do that much because I’m 32-weeks pregnant with twins, so I called the GP’s out of hours emergency number at 8.30.
“They said they would call me back but they didn’t, so I called them back at 9.15 and they said they had put us down for a visit from the district nurse but she was busy.”
Miss Thomson said she then spoke to a doctor at 10.15 who said he felt Mrs Habberjam should be admitted to hospital and that an ambulance would be with them in one to two hours but it was nearly four hours later when paramedics eventually turned up.
St John’s Chapel councillor, John Shuttleworth said he felt the slow response was an indication of how the current NHS operates. He said: “Maybe in the future people should just phone the undertaker direct rather than phone for an ambulance.
“Heads should roll for this. I have written to the head of the Primary Care Trust and if I don’t get a quick answer I will be down there knocking on their door.”
Ms Thomson, who is a psychiatric nurse, said: “Next time I will just ring 999 and lie if I need to. I was honest this time and it took nearly six hours to get someone out to see my nanna. I think there is no hope if you live in rural areas.”
