Trust apology over four-hour ambulance wait for 90-year-old man

Deana Challis said she was "very angry" with the state of the healthcare system

A health trust has apologised to the family of a 90-year-old man who waited four hours for an ambulance after falling down a flight of stairs and breaking several bones.

Bill Jenkins, from Haverhill, Suffolk, was taken to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, where he later died from Covid and pneumonia.

His daughter, Deana Challis, said the wait for help was unacceptable.

The East of England Ambulance Service apologised for the "standard of care".

Mr Jenkins hit a stairlift after falling on the stairs in early October.

His daughter said they were told it would be a six-hour wait for an ambulance, but one arrived four hours after the call was made at 01:09 GMT.

Mrs Challis said her father was taken to hospital two hours later, as another ambulance crew was required to help.

He died more than a week later, on 17 October.

"It's just wrong," Mrs Challis said.

"He'd broke his leg in two places, he'd fractured his shoulder, he'd broke his arm, broke ribs, and then a week later they found he had broken a small bone in his back."

Stephen Barclay, Secretary for Health and Social Care, said the government was providing a £500m winter fund to help with the pressure

Mrs Challis said she felt "very angry" about the whole healthcare system, and said a four-hour wait for an ambulance should never become acceptable.

"The government need to step in and start doing something," she said.

"They're not helping because they're just pushing everything under the carpet and thinking people can just carry on with the way it is."

A spokesperson for the ambulance trust said: "We continue to offer our sincere condolences to Mr Jenkins' family and would like to apologise again for the standard of care he received.

"On this day we were experiencing an extremely high demand through significant delays in handing over patients at hospitals."

Paramedics had told the BBC on some days they could only reach one or two patients a day instead of the normal three or four - because they were stuck outside hospitals, waiting to handover patients.

Stephen Barclay, Secretary for Health and Social Care, and MP for North East Cambridgeshire, acknowledged the pressure this was putting on the service.

"The big pressure is largely triggered by those who were fit to leave hospital but delayed in doing so," he said.

"We need to free up that bed capacity and that is often about having the right social care provision to do so."

Mr Barclay said the government was providing a £500m winter fund to help hospitals discharge patients who were medically fit to leave, but could not because of a lack of support available in the community.