An NHS boss suffering a stroke was 'too afraid' to call an ambulance due to the 'worst ambulances handover delays of any region'.
Deborah Lee, who is the chief executive of the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS, said she is "grateful" she didn't have to call an ambulance after suffering a stroke on April 22.
After hearing Mrs Lee "lament" the imbalance delays, her husband drove her straight to the hospital himself where she received instant treatment, Gloucestershire Live reported.
The Gloucestershire health boss decided to travel to A&E by car instead of an ambulance where she was given "clot-busting" drugs and underwent a CT scan and taken to Oxford for a thrombectomy.
She praised the "pace, expertise and kindness" of the NHS staff she met along the way.
In a post on Twitter, the health boss imagined a very different scenario had she not got to the hospital promptly.
Mrs Lee reflected on the prompt treatment she received as she wrote on Twitter: "What if my husband hadn’t been there and my daughter had called for an ambulance and I’d been put in the Cat 2 'stack'?
"Through no fault of its own, the South West has the worst ambulances handover delays of any region; my system is working unrelentingly to solve this but to no great avail.
"The problem isn’t the front door of hospitals, it’s the back.
"It’s a complete lack of flow, with no silver bullet and I don’t have the answer, but the government has the power to generate one.
"Starting with an overhaul of social care - training, development, pay reform and the professionalisation of care workers to build a sector that people want to join, stay in and feel proud to belong to.
"Care built in communities, around people's own homes and, not just for when they’ve crumpled and ended up in hospital but truly preventative care.
"Thankfully I won’t be needing social care either but I so very nearly might have…"
Ambulance response times in England have risen to their worst levels on record, recent figures show.
The average response time last month for ambulances in England dealing with the most urgent incidents – defined as calls from people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries – was nine minutes and 35 seconds.
This was worse compared to a figure of eight minutes and 51 seconds in February.
In fact, the response time recorded last month is the longest average since current records began in August 2017.
In the South West, where Mrs Lee works, the average response time for a category two call, which includes strokes, is at one hour 53 minutes – the highest in England.
The target for that category of call is 18 minutes.
