BBC listeners heard the harrowing 999 call of a dying patient waiting for an ambulance last night.
Kenneth Shadbolt, 94, rang the emergency services after falling at home in Chipping Campden, Gloucs, in March.
The retired carpenter told the call-handler: “I’m getting worse by the minute.
“I’m laying on the kitchen floor, the bathroom floor, because I have had a bad fall.
“Oh, I feel terrible sick. I’m in terrible pain.
“If it’s going on another half an hour I’ll probably be dead.
“Oh my headache, oh my God.
“Send me the undertaker, that will be the best bet.
“I can’t move, I can’t move at all. Oh, it’s getting worse. Oh blimey, oh quick, send somebody quick.”
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The call-handler told Ken to take care and said they would send an ambulance “as quickly as we can”.
Tragically he was unconscious by the time an ambulance arrived five hours later and died in hospital.
Ken’s family said the failure of paramedics to turn up quicker “shames our health service”.
The call aired on BBC Radio 4’s ‘File on 4’ as it went on the frontline of the ambulance crisis.
Kenneth’s son Grahame said earlier this year: “He would never kick up a fuss.
“But even though he wasn’t complaining, he was clearly saying I need your help.
“He was alone, increasingly distressed, and vulnerable. He had every reason to expect an ambulance in good time.
“That it didn’t come shames our health service.”
His younger son Russell, 64, said: “It’s bad enough to lose your loved one but to think of Dad lying on the floor injured and frightened is so very hard.
“We were brought up that you go to work, pay your taxes, and you have faith in the NHS to be there when you need it. But it wasn’t.”
Several years ago, the harrowing calls of a pensioner who died waiting for an ambulance that never came were revealed.
Michael Green made two emergency calls for help before he died at his Stocking Farm home.
Nine months later, the family of the 74-year-old were still demanding answers from the East Midlands Ambulance Service, reported Leicestershire Live.
In two distressed and distressing calls recorded by East Midlands Ambulance Service, handed over to his family, he can be heard painfully pleading for help.
Mr Green, who suffered from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and pancreatitis can be heard telling operators that he had been stuck in his chair for five hours with a table pressing against his neck, and that he was "passing out".
His family are uncertain how the table came to be pressing against him other than to think it may have happened while he was trying to reach his phone.
They are also unsure why he didn’t call a family member, although it was later discovered he had made five 999 calls, although only two had connected.
