A pensioner who called 111 after vomiting brown liquid was given Tesco's customer service number, before later being admitted to hospital where she was forced to spend days in A&E.
Julia Jago, 89, revealed that she was unable to keep food down for days and had been vomiting brown liquid.
After calling the line to get medical help, the sick woman from Ashford, Kent, answered a series of yes or no questions.
Following this, she was given a number, which NHS 111 claimed to be a pharmacy, report The Telegraph.
However, to her shock, when her daughter, Sally Jones, googled the number it came up as Tesco ’s customer service number.
What left them even more surprised was that when they phoned up, they got a recorded message which just said 'we cannot give you any information on store openings or stock’.
Then, when Mrs Jones called the local supermarket pharmacy using the correct number, they advised her to give her mother 'sips of water'.
Being left appalled at the advice given for such severe symptoms her mum was experiencing, she decided to take her to A&E where she was immediately put on a drip and has remained in hospital since.
Mrs Jones has said that her encounter with 111 was "horrifying", saying: “If I hadn’t got my wits about me to take her in, somebody wouldn’t have done it, and she would have been, I don’t know, that’s just really unforgivable.
“She needed to go on a drip, she was dehydrated, I mean eventually she would have died if she hadn’t gone in.”
Mrs Jago was then forced to spend four days in A&E at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford due to the fact that there were no ward beds available for her.
Astoundingly, it also took a week for her to receive an endoscopy to establish the cause of her sickness.
Eventually, when the results came back, doctors discovered that Mrs Jago had a stent in her intestine that had become dislodged, and was therefore causing a blockage.
As of Friday night, the 89-year-old was still awaiting surgery, but was being give nutrition and fluids intravenously in order to help her build up her strength for the operation.
However, while Mrs Jones has claimed that her mother hasn't eaten for two weeks, and is so weak that she cannot stand up, she said that she cannot fault the staff at William Harvey Hospital.
While she said that nurses and doctors there are 'up against a rock and a hard place', she had described the advice given by NHS 111 as “farcical”.
She went on to add that she was already feeling "super stressed" with her mothers symptoms, and that the NHS not helping them just doubled her worries.
Latest NHS data has shown that emergency services in England are experiencing sustained pressure, with some 43,792 people waiting longer than 12 hours in A&E in October - up a third from 32,776 in September.
And most recently, it was reported that A&E staff have been reduced to tears after claiming they have been forced to resuscitate patients in the waiting room as people wait days for beds.
Speaking about Mrs Jago's admission, Sarah Shingler, chief nursing and midwifery officer, at East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We’re sorry to Mrs Jago and her family for the delay she experienced in being transferred to a ward following treatment in our emergency department, which is seeing sustained levels of high demand.
“Where there is a delay in admitting a patient to hospital, staff continuously review patient care to ensure they are safely cared for until they are admitted to an appropriate ward.”
A spokesman for South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust, which runs NHS 111 services in the area, added: “We are sorry to hear of these concerns which we take seriously. We invite Mrs Jago or her family to contact us directly so we can look into their concerns in detail.”
