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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

To be so angry that my baby could have died and no emergency service could reach us

79 replies

CountryMummy1 · 02/07/2015 15:45

My 14 month old baby had a severe episode of croup a few nights ago, so bad that he went blue and floppy. We were at my parents house in Wales and had to phone the ambulance. It took them 2 hours to locate us as the road that leads to the house was not in their map. It was the worst 2 hours of my life. When they eventually found us (from asking at other houses) they discovered that they couldn't get the ambulance down our road so they had to run up.

DS was so bad that my husband had to drive him, me and the 2 ambulance men down the road back to the ambulance.

Obviously I can't risk this ever happening again as my parents are now elderly. Having phoned the council I have found out that it is classed as an unadopted footpath?? Surely this can't be right if it is the only vehicle access to the property. What on earth do i do now?

OP posts:
maddening · 02/07/2015 21:07

Who owns the land you use to access the property - is it their drive?

maddening · 02/07/2015 21:15

Ps yy to the grid ref - sat navs can work on longitude and latitude- go back to the main road and see if you can put a clear road name sign there? When you call an ambulance make sure they have your mobile and write down good easily followed driving instructions from the different directions that they may be coming from - have a local map by the phone so you can work out where they are if lost as you can just read the instructions out which would be easier if you are in a stressful situation.

Hulababy · 02/07/2015 21:19

If not able to pinpoint your location with an accurate working postcode your better calling the other emergency number, via a mobile phone. It has better satellite tracking/gps.

maddening · 02/07/2015 21:21

Ps living rurally is a wonderful way of life but with it you accept there will be limitations in services and make sure you adapt to living away from other people - it has it's blessings and it's curses .

Although we were in a village growing up it still had limitations - buses we're very two hours and often they missed the village altogether, the last but was 5.30 and there was a post bus (you travelled in the post van). The doctors surgery was in a caravan and you were more cut off from emergency services - except for ambulances once you hit the 90's as there was a big old people's home so There was an ambulance station 5 mins away.

goodasitgets · 02/07/2015 21:31

Don't call the other number - it makes absolutely no difference. I don't know where it started but we can't track you except to the nearest mast which could be a location of 50 streets or a huge area of countryside

VivaLeBeaver · 02/07/2015 21:34

The bin thing is quite standard, they won't go down an unadopted road. It's the homeowners responsibility to get their rubbish to the nearest public adopted road.

florascotia · 02/07/2015 21:41

lljkk - People who live in rural areas don't pay reduced Council Taxes. It costs local authorities (and other service providers, such as electricity companies) a great deal more per head of the tax-paying/fee-paying population to provide/maintain services in rural areas than in densely-populated cities. Here, in this part of rural Scotland, we don't get bin collections, either. But one day each week, we are asked to put bin-bags by the side of the little one-track road - that's several hundred yards from some houses - and the council pays local crofters to collect them in a farm trailer. However, if Welsh local authorites can't arrange something like that, then perhaps another local campaign is called for by the OP's parents....

Lapsed - Remote rural areas often have very small and very scattered populations. So how would you provide for our area which has a population of maybe 250 full-time residents scattered over almost 200 sq km, in around a dozen tiny settlements? You couldn't possibly put an ambulance in each one. Some sort of local emergency provision, such as first responders, IS needed, however.

HirplesWithHaggis · 02/07/2015 21:47

I do pay a slightly reduced council tax. We have a cess pit/septic tank so don't have to pay the sewerage element.

We also have to take our bins to the nearest adopted road, a few hundred yards away, we get the same service frequency as the nearby towns, but we're not particularly remote.

lljkk · 02/07/2015 21:50

we pay reduced council tax because we don't have any surface run off (lowland England).
Just wondered if OP's parents paid less since no refuse collection service.

Funny the comment about NHS being National. Dunno about Wales or NI, but the Scottish NHS is increasingly different in most ways from rUK.

specialsubject · 02/07/2015 21:58

the sewerage reduction for a septic tank comes off the water bill, not the council tax.

if you live in a rural area and/or in a house with difficult access you have to accept these risks. There is no way that everyone in the UK can have the same speed of emergency services response.

OP - your parents need to consider their options.

Saz12 · 02/07/2015 22:19

My DD has asthma, and we had numerous emergency situations. Our local A&E is about an hours (fast) drive away - 40 miles or so - (we're not really that rural, but services are centralized). We have been told MANY times not to drive as ambulances have oxygen and nebulizers and our Nissan Note does not. It makes sense to drive to end of own driveway whilst waiting for ambulance, though!

On holiday in Cornwall, a first responder came out as the ambulance was 2hrs away, and they could provide oxygen, nebuliser, etc. First Responders are volunteers, though.

I agree with OP that 2 hours for emergency response because "they couldn't find us" is poor - is there a back story there?

CptJack · 02/07/2015 22:20

It's not just the welsh ambulance service under immense pressure.

GP practices across mid wales are facing a recruitment crisis. There aren't enough new doctors attracted to the area to make it sustainable.

Quite recently Machynlleth surgery has been handed back to the health board. I wouldn't be surprised if others follow suit in the medium term

TooExtraImmatureCheddar · 02/07/2015 22:21

How is it that your parents have no bin collection at all? Not even something like flora describes, which is funded by the council if not directly carried out by them?

MadAboutMathsMum · 02/07/2015 23:32

When we lived down a long unadopted track in Wales we had to take the bin to the end of it, would have thought that was standard practice.
To get the council to adopt a road you need to get whoever owns the road/footpath to an acceptable standard ie tarmacked well etc. Doesn't mean they have to adopt it then, but they certainly won't do it otherwise.
Although if it is an actual footpath it is illegal to drive a car down it.

TinklyLittleLaugh · 02/07/2015 23:44

I live on an unadopted road and we get our bins collected. It is a proper Tarmac road though.

GiddyOnZackHunt · 03/07/2015 00:03

We lived up an unadopted 'road' which was potholed to hell and the bin lorry used to reverse up it beeping away merrily. Confused
I thought advice was that where an ambulance is called somewhere tricky, if you can someone should wait near the main road to direct the ambulance. Obviously only if there are spare people that is!
Ambulance services everywhere are stretched. A few stupid calls can cause havoc. Even a few genuine calls requiring transfer to hospital can debilitate a service outside of a city.

Bilberry · 03/07/2015 00:12

The footpath thing is surely just about public rights of way i.e. The public only have a right to walk down it, they cannot drive down it? But that doesn't mean it can't also be a private drive with private rights of way over it.

goodasitgets · 03/07/2015 00:19

Best advice is to write/email in. The service will have a complaints department which is impartial. They will investigate including looking at the coding of the call, how many vehicles/calls there were, your location etc and then contact you with the info

MoustacheofRonSwanson · 03/07/2015 01:42

Sorry to hear that, it must have been terrifying.

I would see if the road can be adopted. In DH's small hometown in Scotland, some lanes have recently been given proper name signs so that emergency services could correctly identify them. It was one of those things that everyone local knew them and referred to them by the same name, but there were no proper markings.

These days so many people rely on google maps and satnav and not local knowledge.

MoustacheofRonSwanson · 03/07/2015 01:42

Sorry to hear that, it must have been terrifying.

I would see if the road can be adopted. In DH's small hometown in Scotland, some lanes have recently been given proper name signs so that emergency services could correctly identify them. It was one of those things that everyone local knew them and referred to them by the same name, but there were no proper markings.

These days so many people rely on google maps and satnav and not local knowledge.

ifgrandmahadawilly · 03/07/2015 08:49

Yanbu. Were they relying on GPS?

I only ask because once, a few years ago I came across a very elderly man, unconscious at a bus stop. When I phoned for an ambulance they were insistent that I give them the exact postcode. Hmm

As I didn't know this (I wasn't from the town on question) it took them half an hour to arrive. This was despite me telling them exactly where I was (the only bus stop on the high street of this small town).

Shocking

ifgrandmahadawilly · 03/07/2015 08:50

Sorry, I forgot to mention, this was in wales also. Caerphilly borough / mid glam.

sashh · 03/07/2015 08:52

OP

Is there a pub near the house?

Pubs are very easy to find, I know you don't want to move a child who is ill but it may be a stop gap while you get things sorted.

In the days before mobiles my dad sold central heating, he would ask for an address and the nearest pub because if he had to ask for directions people know where pubs are even if they don't drink in them.

SirVixofVixHall · 03/07/2015 10:03

I do think this seems a problem across Wales. Aside from my friend with many broken bones (having been run over by a tractor) waiting 45 minutes, I had a fall three years back and was drifting in and out of consciousness, but it still took the ambulance 45 minutes to get here. On another occasion when I had an allergic reaction it was slightly faster, perhaps because I was alone so maybe higher priority? It still took about half an hour, but also they sent firemen first, so I had several lovely firemen giving me oxygen. My village is rural, but it is large, and I'm very easy to find. We are only five minutes from a small town but 45 minutes or slightly more from the nearest large hospital. We are in a well populated area, because the village is large, the small town is close, and there are many other villages close by, but the cottage hospital in the town has been closed, and ambulances come from ridulously far away, sometimes as far as Swansea I think (Swansea is at least an hour and a half away).

Floggingmolly · 03/07/2015 10:18

Glad your baby is ok. I get how terrifying croup can be when it gets bad, but we've never called an ambulance for ours (with 3 kids, we must have had about 5 or six trips to A & E between them); why did you sit there for two hours and not just get in the car?
Or why did you not just get in the car in the first place??