A devastated family have spoke of their agony after being forced to wait 15 hours for an ambulance as their cancer-stricken dad lay freezing in a makeshift shelter. David Wakeley, 87, who has prostate cancer, has been left fighting for his life after taking a fall in his garden.
The incident occurred on Monday evening, however an ambulance didn't arrive at his Cornwall home until the next morning. This meant the pensioner was forced to lie on the concrete floor all night, with his loved ones improvising a tent out of a football goal and umbrellas to shield him from the cold and the rain.
Now, his appalled family are demanding answers and have placed the blame squarely on the Government. Son-in-law Trevor Crane, 64, told The Mirror : “The system is just broken. As a family we know the NHS staff are great and trying their best but you have to ask how things like this keep happening? It just seems like no one cares and no one is willing to fix it.”
His popular father-in-law David, who lives in the village of Indian Queens, was forced to wait on a cold concrete floor in his garden in the wind and rain under a makeshift shelter for hours on end because there were no ambulances to help him. He had suffered seven fractured ribs, a pelvis fractured in two places, grazes to his head and a nasty cut to his arm.
The first call to 999 was made at 7:34pm on Monday night but an ambulance did not turn up until 11am on Tuesday morning – a total of 15 hours and 24 minutes. David’s terrified family were forced to improvise after call handlers insisted their dad could not be moved in case they made things worse.
So his son Phil Wakeley, 58, took control and - alongside his sister Karen, 61, and helpful neighbours - they set about the grim task of trying to keep their elderly dad alive throughout the night.
Phil said: “For an 87-year-old man to be waiting that long on a cold, concrete floor, it is not nice I can assure you. I got through it by taking it step by step and focusing on dad and what he needed but I kept thinking this would be bad enough if he was a youngster but we are talking about an old, frail man here who feels the cold. It was so difficult to deal with but we did the best we could with what was available, it was horrible.”
Phil explained they initially thought the delay might be just a few hours but that it soon became clear no help was coming any time soon so they had to do whatever they could to keep David comfortable.
He said: “We had to try and make the best of a very bad situation so we managed to get some pillows under him but obviously he was in a lot of pain so we have to do it little by little. We kept ringing to try and find out when the ambulance was coming and we just kept getting put off.
“It struck us that although the weather was okay, rain was due to come in, so we had to adapt as best we could so we got the neighbour's football goal posts, I found a tarpaulin sheet in the garage, and we pulled that over the goal and made a bit of a tent.
“But it wasn’t enough for the rain so we ended up having to find three umbrellas just so we could make sure he was dry. At one stage he was in so much pain I had to massage his back because it was aching so badly, all the time just trying to reassure him and make him as comfortable as possible. He has prostate cancer so he has to wear a bag with a catheter so we had to empty that throughout the night and try and keep his spirits up.
"Because he’s old and suffering from cancer he feels the cold quite a bit but recently we got him a heated blanket and I am so thankful we did because I think that got him through the early hours in the end as the temperatures were falling rapidly. All the time we were just waiting, hoping, the ambulance would come soon so this man could get the good care he deserved.”
Phil and his sister Karen stayed by their poor dad’s side throughout the night nursing the best they can and although they insisted their mum Marlene, 82, go to bed she was too upset to sleep a wink as their ordeal wore on hour after hour. They are now spending as much time as they can by their dad’s bedside at the Royal Cornwall in Treliske and “hoping and praying” he pulls through.
But they do not want any other families to have to go through what they did and are demanding the stark situation is sorted out soon. In May inspectors said the number of ambulances waiting outside the Royal Cornwall Hospital is a “major issue".
A month later the newly installed Chief Executive of the region’s newly formed Integrated Care System (ICS), Kate Shields, ensured she had taken in her new role to ensure such queues never happened again stating “the proof will be in the pudding”. She said: “We know we have ambulances waiting outside hospitals. No one here is proud of that.
“The aim of the ICS is for health and care organisations and local authorities to work together and speak with one voice in Cornwall for the benefit of patients.” She added: “When I am old, I know where I’d rather be looked after, and it’s at home with care coming to me rather than in hospital.”
But it is not just the southwest which is struggling to cope with horrific ambulance delays reported across the nation in what many commentators have described as a social care crisis brought up by a backlog of covid related issues and a decade of Tory-led austerity.
Reacting to the awful wait time David and his family had to endure Dr John Puntis, co-chair Keep Our NHS Public, said: “This appalling story clearly shows that pressure on the NHS is now so severe that its basic agreement with the public to treat the sickest in a timely way has been broken.
“After twelve years of rising demand mirrored by a relative decrease in funding, Truss and Sunak must take their heads out of the sand and acknowledge that the crisis in both health and social care services requires an urgent and serious response.”
David’s son Phil says the family are deeply distressed by their hideous experience and want answers but do not think it is as simple as just blaming the medics.
He said: “I can’t criticise the NHS, I think what they do is great, the paramedics that eventually got here were first class. But there is clearly a big problem with the system overall. It’s happening far too much in Cornwall and elsewhere at the moment and it needs sorting out.
“When my mum went to visit him in hospital yesterday she saw about 20 ambulances idling outside, just waiting, what is happening there, it is just not acceptable. We are still in a state of distress and upset about what happened, I was just thinking throughout the night 'I want this ambulance to come quick please’, we haven’t even got the anger yet, we are still just so upset about what has happened to dad and are hoping he pulls through.
“We are a very close family and love our dad very much, we just got together and worked as a team to help him the best we could to help when he needed us. You hear other people’s stories but when it happens to you it is just so scary.
“All we could do is focus on dad and make sure he made it. We are now just focused on dad, he has had a lot of painkillers put into him, and it is just a waiting game really.
“We are just hoping he pulls through and hope it makes it full recovery, we are just hoping and praying at the moment but understand this is not going to be a quick fix and 15 hours on the floor will not have helped him.”
Son-in-law Trevor, who himself suffered a nine-hour wait for an ambulance when suffered a blood infection once insisted the Government must do more to abate the social care crisis He said: “The hospitals are just too full, it feels like they just can’t take you in and if they can’t you have to wait.
“The Government need to address this and provide far more nursing home and care facilities so that if someone does need to come it should never be a problem. Right now all we can do is focus on David and just hope he gets better.”
A spokesperson for the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly’s integrated care system said: “Like other parts of the country, our health and care system continues to experience pressure. The reasons for this are complex, including high demand for primary and secondary care, mental health services and adult social care.
“Our teams continue to work together to support people who need our care and we encourage people to use the most appropriate service – including your local pharmacy, minor injury units or 111 online - to keep our emergency departments and 999 service available for people with urgent and life-threatening needs.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: "We absolutely recognise the pressures ambulance services are facing – with call handlers answering nearly 950,000 calls nationwide in July alone – and we are taking action to support them. This includes the NHS investing £150m to help ambulance services meet pressures and £20m this year to upgrade the ambulance fleet, while we have also grown the ambulance and support staff workforce by almost 40% since April 2010.
“We continue to work closely with the NHS to improve care for patients, tackle delayed discharge and speed up handovers to get ambulances back on the road.”
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