Ambulance workers have described appalling scenes of elderly patients dying on the floors of their homes while waiting for help, as staff walked out again today during a continuing wave of strike action
Dispatchers and call handlers in Crawley, West Sussex, from the Southeast Coast Ambulance Service.
Lisa, 30, a trainee assistant ambulance practitioner, described how her team had several months ago attended an elderly woman who had been “dying on the floor for hours”.: “We ended up having to palliate someone because they had been dying on the floor for hours. She was on the floor for so long her body had given out.” Turning up to these calls to find such a scene left her feeling a “sense of failure”. She added: “It’s a horrible feeling.
“We’ve been driving to a cardiac arrest for 40 minutes, just relying on this poor bloke’s family to do CPR. And understandably they stopped before we arrived,” he said. There was simply not enough coverage, he said, meaning ambulance workers could not reach everyone they needed to. However, Jess Lawson, a call handler, said: “People call us up saying they’ve cut their fingernails too short, that they’ve got an infected toenail, or asking to be taken to their doctors appointment or for a scan at theOther patients called for renewals for prescriptions, if they could not contact their GPs, or if they were waiting too long on hold for the less urgent 111 service.
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