Son's distress as mum dies after being left on the floor in 11-hour ambulance wait
A Leicestershire man whose mother died after she was left lying on her bedroom floor for 11 hours waiting for an ambulance, has spoken of his anger at the delay.
78-year-old Jackie Hulbert fell at her home at Barwell in Leicestershire and died two days later in hospital in Nuneaton from an infection.
Her son, Mathew, says the 'indignity and distress' endured by his mother was 'traumatic'.
He wonders whether she'd still be alive today if the ambulance had got there sooner.
Mathew explains what happened to his mother.
Mathew Hulbert said: "As the hours went by, she was more and more in distress, she kept saying to me, when is help coming?
"I felt incredibly hopeless and powerless, so I was distressed and she was distressed.
"So all I kept doing every few hours was calling 999, I know you're not supposed to that, but it's the one thing you can do, that you feel you have some power over in that situation."
'I felt incredibly hopeless and powerless.'
He added:"I'm not having a go at them (EMAS) and neither are my family, but we think that it's a system that is broken and what I've heard over the past few days is that ambulances are often backed up at hospitals with patients in the ambulance and are not able to off load them and attend other calls.
"So I think we have a whole system approach that is failing. This is not good enough and there has to be changes."
Mathew says he would like to have a meeting with East Midlands Ambulance Service, to talk to them about the pressures they are facing, what they'd like to see change at government level and what campaigners like himself can do to call on people in authority to make the changes that are needed.
He continued: "They've said they are sorry and for the distress it's caused. They talked about the stress they are under and I totally get that.
"But in which case we need more capacity, we need more staff, we need more ambulances, we need the situation in hospitals to be sorted out, so patients can be off loaded, we can't just have a situation where people are expected to wait this many hours."
Charlotte Walker, Head of Operations for Leicestershire at East Midlands Ambulance Service said:
"We are deeply sorry that we were unable to get to the patient sooner and we recognise the distress that this will have caused to her and her family.
"Patient care and safety is always our priority. Unfortunately, we continue to experience a sustained level of life-threatening and serious emergency calls and we continually work to prioritise the sickest and most severely injured patients first.
"We would like to speak to the patient’s family and urge them to get in touch with us at their earliest convenience."