A report has found that one of the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing could have survived if the response of the emergency services had been better.
28-year-old John Atkinson was one of 22 people killed in the attack in May 2017, when Salman Abedi detonated an improvised device in his backpack as concert-goers were leaving the Ariana Grande show. The findings of a public inquiry into the tragedy have now laid bare a number of key failings by the emergency services on the night of the attack, as reported by the Manchester Evening News.
Author Sir John Saunders ruled that Mr Atkinson, from Radcliffe, Greater Manchester, could have survived, writing: "It is likely that inadequacies in the emergency response prevented his survival". John was not seen by paramedics for almost an hour after the bomb went off, with his care left to former pizza shop boss Ronald Blake, who held a makeshift tourniquet fashioned from his wife's belt and folded t-shirts.
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Suffering from catastrophic blood loss, Mr Atkinson repeatedly told the people tending to him: "I'm going to die", before going into cardiac arrest moments after being loaded onto a proper stretcher. John was not taken away from the arena until one hour and 29 minutes after the bomb was detonated, and later died in hospital.
Inquiry chairman Sir John Saunders said in the critical report that 20 of those who died had suffered "unsurvivable" injuries in the terror attack, and said that he was "sure inadequacies in the response did not fail to prevent their deaths". He also said that it was sadly "highly unlikely" that the youngest victim, eight-year-old Saffie-Rose Roussos, could have survived.
He wrote in the report, which is in two volumes across 716 pages: "In the case of John Atkinson, his injuries were survivable. Had he received the treatment and care he should have, it is likely that he would have survived."
Sir John added: "Looked at overall, and objectively, the performance of the emergency services was far below the standard it should have been". Speaking of the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, he said that fire service commanders "should have acted more decisively" on the night.
"In the first quarter of an hour after the attack and thereafter, there was substantial confusion over the location of an RVP. Each emergency service chose its own," he wrote. "In some cases, this was passed on to other agencies. In others, it was not. There should have been a concerted effort to agree a multi-agency RVP where all the emergency services could co-locate."
Other bodies were also criticised in the report, including the North West Ambulance Service, British Transport Police, North West Fire Control (which handles 999 calls for the fire service), the arena’s owners SMG and its’ medical services contractor Emergency Services UK.
In his preface for the report, Sir John wrote: "The heroism shown by very many people that night is striking. Considerable bravery was shown by members of the public who were visiting the building, those who were employed to work at the Victoria Exchange Complex and personnel from the emergency services."
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