The evening before he died, Garry Mogg mowed the lawn, then sat up chatting to his adult daughter, the second of his four children. Having been told by his doctor a few months earlier that he had high cholesterol, the 63-year-old had overhauled his diet, choosing vegetables over pasties and scotch eggs and cutting back on his favourite chocolate biscuits. He felt better than he had done for a long time, he told her that night.
Early the following morning, Garry woke with chest pains at the family home in Oldfield Park, Bath. By 8am he was dead from a cardiac arrest, after waiting an hour and 43 minutes for an ambulance that according to NHS guidelines should have arrived in less than 20.
His wife, Emma, who was forced to perform CPR on her husband on her kitchen floor while waiting for the ambulance crew, is firmly convinced that her husband would have lived if help had arrived earlier.
“I’ve got nothing against the ambulance crews, they were brilliant,” she says. “But I think if an ambulance had been here, certainly within the first half an hour, and they’d got him somewhere with specialist equipment, I do think he would still be here.”
That knowledge “makes me feel sick, but it also makes me angry”, she says. She is aware of the backlogs at emergency departments that tie up ambulance crews, and of the statistics of other patients who were waiting for ambulances at the same time. “But Garry wasn’t just a statistic. He was part of our family.”
It was 5am when Emma, an early riser who was already up and about, was surprised to see her husband follow her downstairs and tell her he had chest pains. He told her not to call an ambulance – “he didn’t want to make a fuss” – but he was pale and didn’t look well, so at 5.07am she rang 999, reaching a dispatcher from South Western Ambulance NHS foundation trust (SWASFT).
“The call itself is a blur, to be honest, but I can remember her saying: ‘I’m organising help.’ I took it at face value that an ambulance was on its way. I thought it would be here within 20, 30 minutes.”
The couple’s two younger children have autism and other additional needs and, while they waited for the ambulance, Emma was busy getting them ready for the day and preparing a packed lunch for her 16-year-old son’s school trip.
“Garry had been going between his chair in the front room, and a chair we’ve got in the kitchen. He came back in and sat down and then he said, ‘Oh, come on ambulance, where’s the ambulance?’ And I glanced at the clock and thought, it’s been over an hour.”
Finally, at 6.32am, she called back, telling the call handler that her husband was describing his pain as “agony” and that she thought he was deteriorating. She was still speaking on the phone when she saw her husband rise to stand by the sink, and then collapse to the kitchen floor, gasping for breath.
“[The dispatcher] said, ‘You need to get him on his back and start doing CPR,’ which was no mean feat because Garry was six foot two, and I’m four foot 11. So my eldest daughter and myself, we’re alternating doing CPR on him, which you never expect to have to do. Not on your husband, on your kitchen floor.”
Garry, his wife has since learned, was assessed as a category 2 case by the initial call handler, meaning an ambulance should have been with him in 18 minutes. When he collapsed and she phoned back after 85 minutes, he was upgraded to category 1, which NHS guidance says should have a response time of seven minutes.
At 6.50am the first of three ambulances arrived, one hour and 43 minutes after Emma’s initial call. But the teams were unable to save him, and he was declared dead, still in their kitchen, at 7.47am.
SWASFT has apologised to the family for not getting there sooner, and offered “sincere condolences”. In a statement, a trust spokesperson told the Guardian: “Our ambulance clinicians strive every day to give their best to patients, but our performance has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, partly due to handover delays at emergency departments.
“Health and social care services are under enormous pressure. We are working with our partners in the NHS and social care, to do all we can to improve the service that patients receive.”
Losing their dad, a “family man” who loved stamp collecting and action movies, has been particularly hard on her children, says Emma. “It’s all the things that he’ll now miss. He’ll miss his youngest finishing school. He’ll miss any future grandchildren, the marriages. I mean – Garry’s sister got married recently, and he should have been there. But he wasn’t.”
