There is no ambulance service anymore

Agree. Infrastructure cannot keep up.

I had a similar experience with my mum who had breast cancer when I called an ambulance as she was unconscious and having breathing difficulties.

Fortunately or unfortunately (after we waited 5 hours) when the operator called to tell me that the ambulance wouldn't be attending she then asked if the rattling noise she could hear was my mum and when I said yes she dispatched someone immediately who was at our house in minutes, telling me that my wonderful mum was actually dying.

It was an incredible shock and made so much worse by the fact that we were lulled into thinking that she wasn't as poorly as she seemed by the operator we had spoken to originally who didn't send someone immediately IYSWIM

People have always taken the piss with 999 and ambulances but we never had these issues in the NHS to anything like the same extent, it was an extreme rarity.

What has changed in recent years? EU citizens have gone back home.

When my mum had a stroke in 2016, the first responder was from ROI, the ambulance guys were both from eastern europe, in hospital she saw a Syrian stroke specialist, some of the nurses on the ward (she was there for 3 weeks) were from Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy.
Even back then, the EU nurses didn't like the brexit result and some had plans to leave.

My DD works in the same hospital, she tells me there are hardly any EU AHP's.

Aunt, Glasgow... 5mins
Mother, London... less than 15mins

DH, Portsmouth... decided it was better to call a taxi, probably out of embarrassment. But was seen very quickly on arrival at A&E (but did think he was one of the few sober there, since it was 1am!)

It is definitely overstretched. They need more paramedics, doctors, nurses, ambulances, beds etc. But every member of staff we met was doing their best.

We all need to be up in arms about why health provision is so dangerously poor in the UK right now
Health provision as a whole. Not just ambulances. You’re assuming that the ambulance is the only bottleneck, and if you drive the patient to hospital they will receive treatment immediately. But that’s not the case. When you arrive at hospital there will still be no treatment available for several hours. In which case you’re better off waiting at home, because there is no facility for critically ill people to wait in the hospital.

You’re not scaremongering.

You are right. Same has happened to us.

Unless the person cannot be moved or is in immediate danger e.g. stopped breathing, loss of consciousness etc, just taken them yourself.

It's not always possible to tell if someone is in immediate danger though.

You can’t do chest compressions if you’re driving so I would argue that actually, it would be better if they go into cardiac arrest in their living room.

You are quite right.
It's the underfunding and the GPs not seeing people, and the public's willingness to call paramedics for the slightest thing but lie about it.
To anyone who voted Tory... this is on you.

@Abraxan a GP here reported calling an ambulance for a patient at the surgery because they’re needed to be seen immediately and were at high risk - they waited for a stupid amount of time, something like 6 hours. So even with a concerned doctor who has assessed the situation clinically there was an unsafe wait.

Having worked in a position reliant on QA sorting out their ambulance admissions process, this doesn’t surprise me. This was pre pandemic, but it was standard to have them queuing down the road. No wonder there’s none available to tend to calls.

A lot of paramedics here are not rushing from one job to the next. They will tell you - they are stuck for hours outside A&E she would love to be able to rush from job to job.

I do think there is an element of 111 requesting ambulances when people could make their own way. I damaged my knee badly ( needed surgery) called 111, who said I needed an ambulance I offered to make my own way - relatively young, fit, another adult in the home and live close to A/E, told no, I then endured hours of no ambulances, with a couple of calls to tell me ambulance pushed back until the ambulance service asked me to make my own way. I was in agony the whole time and instead of taking an hour or so to get to hospital, of which most of that was getting down the stairs, it took about 8 hours

111 tend to say an ambulance is on its way/wait for an ambulance/don’t take them yourself but they have no idea what is actually happening at the 999 centre. If you can get to A&E safely yourself I’d always do that rather than call an ambulance.

unfortunately they prioritise calls by how quickly you might die, not how much pain or discomfort you are in - a heart attack will kill you faster than a broken hip. So chest pain will get you an ambulance quicker than a painful hip. So someone with a pulled muscle will get a fast ambulance and an elderly person with a potentially lifechanging injury will get a slower one. Scandalous.

I think if you can (stable enough and able to move) then people should take people to hospital and leave ambulances for when their is no alternative. I have dashed Ds to A and e myself many times.

i have had to call an ambulance for my Mum twice this year - unconscious so no cjoice - and both times they came very quickly and where amazing

Yeah the system is broken. Not because of paramedics but social care out the other end.

Plus if the person is well enough leave the ambulance for someone who needs it
Seems logical doesn’t it? But what happens is that the patient needs to lie in the ambulance outside for several hours before they receive treatment. So the ambulance is required as a waiting facility. (This is why we have no ambulances!) If the patient turns up in their own car they don’t have an ambulance to lie in while they wait, and there’s nowhere else for them to lie, so the hospital will turn them away.

I don’t know why hospitals can’t build a large waiting facility with rows of beds and nurses on duty, so the ambulances can drop the patient and go. That would solve the ambulance problem immediately.

You’re right that it isn’t new, I can remember in the mid-90s stories of dreadful waits and long waiting lists.

I think that the issue is in the late 90s and early 2000s huge improvements were made which means we got used to a more functional service. It is not unreasonable to expect steady progress rather than rapid decline in something as vital as emergency healthcare.

We were told there was a ten hour wait for a large third degree burn. I wrapped him in clingfilm and loaded him into the back of a neighbours van instead.

and the public's willingness to call paramedics for the slightest thing but lie about it.

Is this actually true though & when the patient presents in a&e with nothing wrong with them what actually happens?

This is all about discharge from hospital social care, something that the tories, by reversing the national insurance rise, have just defunded without saying it loud.

I'm an orthopaedic surgeon, we normally have around 30-40 patients in the hospital, we currently have 96, of those, 40 are waiting for a rehab or nursing bed, or for things like equipment or care packages to be arranged so they can go home.

Because of that, people are waiting for literally days in A&E or Admissions wards, tying up physical space and nursing staff, so when someone arrives that can't be handed over, the paramedics have to stay with them - sometimes for a whole shift, or longer.

There might be slightly fewer paramedics than 5 or 10 years ago, but the real problem is they can't do their job because the whole system is jammed.

There's a huge difference between talking about your own experience and saying it doesn't exist at all.

There's a difference between, talking about your own experience and deciding to give blanket medic help on a anonymous forum

I called an ambulance recently and they arrived within 10 minutes. Very much aware that's a rarity though.

YANBU - my friend's brother died recently while waiting for an ambulance that never showed up.