Victim of a heart attack, the hospital does not send him an ambulance because “he is not completely unconscious”: in the emergency room, he waits 44 hours to get a bed – Media7
The 56-year-old was forced to take a taxi to the hospital.
No ambulance and 44 hours of waiting in hospital, this is the ordeal experienced by David Williams in May 2022. While he is at his home in Leyland, in the northwest of England, the 56-year-old man suffers a heart attack. At that moment, his wife, Manjit, called 999, the emergency and rescue number used in the United Kingdom.
But at the end of the line, she doesn’t get the answer she’s hoping for. “I was told to call an ambulance myself,” she told Lancs Live. She complies but the medical regulation assistant then explains to her that they will not send her an ambulance because her husband “is not completely unconscious”.
“The most humiliating part”
Instead, a taxi is sent to take the couple to the nearest hospital. But there, their ordeal is far from over because David will have to wait 44 hours in the emergency room before getting a bed. This will be “the most humiliating part” of their terrible experience, in Manjit’s words. “He stayed overnight and the next day a doctor told him it was the pills that were the cause.”
Two months earlier, the former truck driver had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s syndrome of vascular origin. Questioned by our British colleagues, a spokesperson for the North West Ambulance Service invited the couple to contact the patient safety team so that the incident could be investigated.
