Dame Jenni Murray has spoken candidly about how a severe bout of Covid left her stranded for hours on an ambulance trolley and later overnight in a plastic chair, in a stark reflection of the pressures facing the NHS.
The veteran broadcaster, 75, said she initially mistook her symptoms for a “scary but familiar asthma attack” before becoming “more breathless”, aching all over and unable to walk from one room to the next.
Alone at home, she took an old Covid test. “Positive was an unsurprising but frightening result,” she told the Decelber issue of Saga Magazine. “I was barely able to breathe.”
After calling for help, she was taken to hospital — but was shocked to see first-hand how stretched the system has become. “I knew our poor, underfunded, crisis-ridden NHS had been forced to treat emergencies in hospital corridors… but somehow I hadn’t expected it to happen to me. But it did.”
Instead of being taken to a ward, she said she spent “around two hours” lying on the ambulance trolley in a corridor “lined up alongside the wall waiting for attention”.
When she was eventually moved, it was to a curtained-off space by a busy corridor. A nurse confirmed she had Covid, but a request for a bed and help with her breathing “was not forthcoming”.
“Clearly, I was to spend the night in the squishy blue plastic chair,” she said. “Impossible given the noise, the uncomfortable chair and the lack of any food or drink apart from a glass of water. I debated discharging myself but I felt too ill.”
The situation deteriorated when a trainee nurse attempted to remove a cannula, only for part of it to become lodged in her hand. “A team of four vascular surgeons turned up but couldn’t find it,” she said.
After several scans failed to locate the fragment, she tried to leave, only to be called back when the missing plastic finally showed on X-ray.
Despite the ordeal, Murray stressed she does not blame NHS staff. “I’ve no doubt everyone at the hospital wanted to do their best for me, but how can they with too many patients, too few trained staff and no beds?”
