Elderly couple left waiting hours for an ambulance on more than one occasion

North West Ambulance Service

A local elderly couple have been left waiting hours for an ambulance on more than one occasion.

Ron Gerner and his wife, Pat, had to ring for an ambulance at 9pm on 26 December, which arrived at 5am the following morning.

It was 5am the following morning before the ambulance arrived to take Pat to Fairfield General Hospital. She arrived at Fairfield shortly after 5am, but was not admitted to a ward until around 2pm that day, despite being incredibly sick.

Since then, Pat’s health has deteriorated, and she has been moved to Springhill Hospice. She was due to be picked up by an ambulance at 11am on Tuesday (22 January). The ambulance did not arrive and her family was told it would arrive at 8am the morning after (Wednesday 23 January), but did not arrive until 10am.

Ron then contacted local MP, Tony Lloyd, who was able to raise the issue during a parliamentary debate about the North West Ambulance Service later that day on 22 January.

Mr Lloyd said: “The treatment of Mr and Mrs Gerner is a shocking example of the real effect on people’s lives of the incompetence of health ministers and the silence of leaders of the North West Ambulance Service Trust.

“This morning, the ambulance due to transport Mrs Gerner from hospital arrived two hours after the second allotted time, and almost a day after the original promise.

"Our emergency care system is under resourced and overstretched so paramedics and technicians, who are doing their best, are unable to fully do their jobs as they are kept in queues outside A&E.

"Government ministers must show a lot more urgency in tackling these deep-rooted problems and find a better way to transfer ambulance patients into hospital care and invest in more paramedics to keep pace with demand.

“An elderly couple like Mr and Mrs Gerner, who are going through a very difficult time in their lives, should be treated massively better. They should be cosseted, not face the kind of outrage that has now affected their lives.

“We have a crisis that is putting people at risk, and it is unacceptable for an elderly lady, needing to be in hospice care, to be treated in the way that she has.”

Speaking in parliament, the MP said: “They are happy for me to talk about this because, not unnaturally, Ron is livid on his wife’s behalf. I am livid on their behalf, and indeed on behalf of the whole of their family.

"It is something of an irony that when I wanted to illustrate the failings of North West Ambulance Service with parliament, that phone call, totally unsolicited, came into my office.

“First and foremost, we must value the paramedics and the technicians who make our ambulance service work, and nothing whatever of what I am saying is critical of them. They joined the service to help save lives and to get people into our national health service, but this is of course the reality, and I am grateful to people who have spoken privately about what is going on.

“The sad reality is that North West Ambulance Service is a shambles. That, of itself, underlies something much more serious - as a shambles - it is of course putting people’s lives at risk. This is simply unacceptable in modern Britain.

“North West Ambulance Service, apart from a brief flurry of activity, has not hit its targets since 2014. Just very briefly in the summer of 2015, things seemed to have got back up to the norm, but at the moment, in about three out of four of the most serious cases, it is missing the target that has been established at national level. That is putting people at risk.”

Mr Lloyd added: “The decision to close the Rochdale Accident and Emergency facility some years back inevitably means that instead of being taken to the local hospital people in my constituency have to travel further afield. That of course puts pressure on an ambulance service that is already under pressure elsewhere.

“When Rochdale A&E was closed, a commitment was made to the people of my constituency that there would be a paramedic on every ambulance coming from Rochdale. We have found out that that is simply an illusion. We were told at the time, ‘Don’t worry. You will have to travel a little bit further, but you will be travelling with highly skilled paramedics.’

“The reality is that over the past six years, the demands in the highest category in the north-west have gone up by some 50%. At the same time, the number of paramedics has increased by only 16% and the number of those in technician grades by some 28%, so the staffing simply is not keeping pace with the change in demand.

"One in four of the most serious category calls across the north-west do not have a paramedic in attendance, because we do not have enough paramedics in the service.

“At Royal Oldham, one of our local hospitals, an ambulance had to wait for three hours and 46 minutes before it could discharge one of its patients on 7 January. At North Manchester – again, one of the hospitals that Rochdale borough depends on – an ambulance took eight hours and 50 minutes to do so on 3 January: somebody waited in the back of an ambulance for eight, or nearly nine, hours. At Fairfield, which is also one of our local hospitals, a figure of over 10 hours was recorded in December.

“Something is going fundamentally wrong when people are waiting in the back of an ambulance for the care that they ought to be getting inside our hospitals.

"However, something else is going wrong, because such cases mean that the skilled staff in those ambulances cannot be out on the road going to the next job where they are needed and to the one after that.

“We need to see some transfer of resource into our ambulance service, if we are not going to face this crisis not simply in the winter, but every day of every week of the year.”