brother died in middle of road waiting for ambulance

[hangingonfordearlife1]

2 weeks ago my brother was driving taxi when he experienced chest pains. his customer called 999. 1hour and 30 minutes later he went into cardiac arrest and customer started cpr on floor in road. when ambulance turned up 15 minutes later he was still in cardiac arrest. tried 5 times to revive him and worked on him. arrived at hospital 45 minutes later and pronounced deceased.

the ambulance took 1hour and 45 minutes to arrive for a suspected heart attack and then a further 45 minutes to get him to hospital

he's gone and nothing we can do about that but legally where do we stand about asking for an investigation. Not for compensation but actual reasons so we can understand what happened. why did they take so long?

Also we didn't find out until 1 day later after calling round the hospitals to see if he had been admitted as hadn't heard from him. his address was clear on his driving license. why didn't they inform us?

It's a social care crisis not a problem with the ambulance service.

The ambulances are unavailable as they are sat outside A&E, but it's not the A&Es fault because they have already massively exceeded their safe staffing to patient ratios with patients on trolleys and chairs along every corridor, it's not the bed managers fault who can't magic beds (or the additional trained staff) out of nowhere. The beds are blocked with patients needing discharge back into the community but residential nursing/care homes don't have the capacity and there aren't enough social carers to put care packages in place at home.

Social carers who are predominantly women and ethnic minorities (and worse still, women of ethnic minority) are underpaid, often in appalling terms and conditions and not afforded the respect and recognition they deserve for the work they do.

Sort out social care and then you'll have your ambulances available, operating theaters operating and beds for the acutely sick in A&E.

Oh I agree and I probably shouldn’t have included the ambulance service.

I am very sorry for your loss OP. I hope you get answers and I hope this, in part, will help you on your journey of grieving your precious brother x

(my 20 y/o Ds recently in heart failure, ongoing issues & his 'treatment' by all depts has been almost entirely awful. The NHS is completely broken now)

Sorry for your loss.

I’m very sorry for your loss.

I would be speaking to a solicitor to see what they suggest. I would have no qualms of suing the NHS for the suffering it causes.

I wouldn’t trust an internal investigation to get the truth.

Perhaps if enough people do that something might change.

I'm so sorry for the loss of your brother @hangingonfordearlife1.

I remember when I was 18 so a good 21 years ago now, my Mum coming home from work she worked in the hospital kitchens with a nice man and he had a cardic arrest at work in the kitchens on hospital grounds.
Ambulance was called and had taken 45mins to arrive on scene,
There was nothing anyone could of done it all happened so quickly. I don't think my Mums colleague could of been saved.
I'm so sorry this should not have happened. so sad x

I am very sorry for your tragic loss, OP. It is impossible to comprehend in a developed country and the fact that they couldn't be bothered to tell family about his passing for a full day must feel like adding insult to injury.

I hope you get the answers you are looking for and find peace

I’m very sorry for your loss. The upset and anger that if he’d been treated more promptly might have made a difference must make it more upsetting. The coroner/coroners officer might be a good point of contact as this is the sort of stuff which is in their remit to look at during the inquest process. Alongside a complaint to the ambulance service and contacting your MP.

Ultimately there is only x number of staff/physical ambulances and if they’re busy then they’re busy, so not the fault of the ambulance service but a lack of funding.

I totally understand this. Since our DC1 is at university in the UK, we have been similarly stunned at the lack of care and no access to specialists who might be able to provide diagnosis/treatment in what passes for a healthcare system in the UK. We are keeping DC2 in continental Europe.

British friends who have settled around us before Brexit consider themselves lucky that they will never again be at the mercy of the NHS. They are never going back if they can help it.

The utter lack of timely response in emergency care not to mention ongoing medical care and follow-up in the UK is nothing short of terrifying, and I find it incomprehensible that MNers seem to think NHS is wonderful and would be back to its perfect self if only some more money were thrown at it.

You need to look around at how healthcare is managed in other developed countries to understand how pathetic (sadly and shockingly pathetic) your country's healthcare system is. The whole system needs overhaul. You deserve to see real doctors after waiting for hours at A&E, not be fobbed off with "physician's assistants" and nurses. You deserve to see the specialist for your condition without waiting weeks or months for a referral. You deserve follow up. You deserve timely information and treatment about your ongoing conditions. You definitely deserve an ambulance when you are having a heart attack FFS

they couldn't be bothered to tell family about his passing for a full day must feel like adding insult to injury

I am not sure that a hospital has the ability to trace the phone number of NOK from a house address on a driving license.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Obviously im not saying some hospital nurse should track down next of kin. I'm saying there should be a system that gets triggered when someone is pronounced dead at a hospital so that their family is informed by the relevant authorities.

First aid trainer here… I know it won’t change a horrific situation. However it might quiet some of the ‘what ifs’ to know that the chances of a person surviving such an event outside of hospital are microscopic. Chances of surviving CPR out of hospital are about 10% and only when a defibrillator is then used within a few minutes. The time the ambulance took to arrive is unlikely to have made a difference.

I'm so sorry to hear about your brother. Such a wait for an ambulance is never acceptable.

However the truth is hospitals are at capacity, patients have no where to go as they are either awaiting carers (in very short supply as they are paid and treated like shit), or are medically very unwell with doctors working to a very medical model often influenced by their religious and cultural beliefs of wanting to 'save' everyone, or patients (or more often their families) are refusing to go home until they are 100 % as fit and well, especially in terms of mobility, as they were before they came in.

Additionally we have a population of people who are increasingly older in age and also an increasing number of people who are of poor health due to life style choices. Additionally we have high levels of poverty, social isolation and mental health issues which impacts on physical health.

These people are stuck in hospital beds, therefore ED is unable to discharge their patients that need a bed up to the ward. As a result an ambulance is stuck outside ED not able to get their poorly patient into the ED department and not being free to answer an emergency call out, as much as they want to.

Additionally NHS staff are so sick of this situation, that seems to be getting worse not better, they are leaving and recruitment is difficult.

Hopefully people reading this thread will now think twice about calling an ambulance for a twisted ankle etc, but also families who are blocking relatives discharge from hospitals as they feel they know better than doctors, physiotherapists, occupational therapists etc, will understand the bigger picture here.

That's awful. So sorry

Did you read the OP? Her brother had the heart attack 1.5 HOURS after the ambulance was called for the chest pains he was experiencing. The ambulance still wasn't there.

How would it make no difference if the ambulance showed up on time and took him to the hospital BEFORE the cardiac arrest?

No, I am not. But thanks for being so rude, as you often are.

Your phrasing “they couldn’t be bothered” indicated you thought the hospital was at fault.

If what you want is a compulsory database of NOK phone numbers, then that’s not an NHS issue, but a governmental one, and so the phrase “they couldn’t be bothered” about the hospital is even less appropriate. But again, characteristically rude.

I’m so sorry for your loss. This is actually happening all the time. It’s not even unusual anymore.

Ambulance services are stretched beyond belief. It’s often best to drive/taxi the patient to hospital rather than wait for an ambulance.

You can raise concerns with the hospital and/or contact the coroner's office.

I have a clinical negligence claim going on against the trust that treated my Dad last where he died at their hands - I am also a nurse.

First and foremost call PALS they then asked me to put all of my questions in an email / complaints letter. This was then read by his consultant who escalated it as a significant incident (catastrophic due to the fact he died) and it was then formally investigated by the patient safety team. Many months later I had a full written report which enabled me to see a time line of his care and the catastrophic failures that led to his death. I had approached a Solicitor in the beginning but they would not take on the case until the report was done.

I have no qualms in taking litigation out against the NHS, my Dad would not have died if it had not been for their failure. Please OP contact PALS they were very helpful at what is a very very difficult time

Sorry for your loss.

Not enough staff.

Not enough ambulances.

Too much demand.

Not enough funding.

He would have been better calling one of his taxi friends to take him to the hospital. This is the key thing to highlight for investigation if he/passenger was told not to make his own way to A&E via someone driving him.

I'm very sorry for your loss.

I work in medical complaint handling. First you need to know what ambulance service was used - they work slightly differently but if you go on their website you can usually either make a complaint directly to them or go via PALS if you want help making it. Once you have a response from the ambulance you can escalate to Parliamentary & Health Services Ombs (in Eng, different oversight bodies in Scot/Wales etc) if you are unhappy.

An inquest is a separate thing - you can't ask for one, it is for the state to decide. If it happened two weeks ago you should have been told by now. Usually in the circumstances you've described it would be the type of death that might need an inquest - ring up the coroner's officer for your local area to ask if you haven't been told.

However, I will warn you straight up that, as pps have said, any complaint is unlikely to have a satisfactory resolution in terms of "why" because the answer is almost always that there just weren't any ambulances to send. Often they will provide stats from the day which show how long patients waited between call and an ambulance getting there. I would be incredibly surprised if 1hr45 mins was the longest wait that day. I've heard of 9hour waits for suspected heart attacks before. They will also have stats to explain why the waits were so long - often "a higher than usual demand on the service" but also because ambulances were tied up at hospital.

I say unlikely because sometimes there are errors made, such as a call handler categorising the incident incorrectly (so instead of a highest priority it was a lower one), or an ambulance that could have been deployed but wasn't, so there can be learning from those. But 99% of the time it is literally that there was nobody to send, because all the ambulances were waiting outside hospital to offload patients. As pps have said, people don't understand the extent to which our "emergency" services are fucked until they experience them themselves.

If you want things to change email your MP with this as an example.

I have no idea who you are so can't say if resorting to personal attacks is "characteristic" for you, but do try to attack the argument and not the person.

You are the one who assumed that the word They in my sentence referred to hospital personnel. I explained it didn't. Get it or don't, but stop with the personal attacks.

“Are you being deliberately obtuse” is as much a personal attack, if not more of one, than me noting you are rude.

HTH. TTFN.

So sorry OP. Awful. And I can understand you wanting to understand what happened, and to make sure if mistakes were made they aren't repeated.

Reading your story, as a journalist, my news senses are twitching. Make a formal complaint to the ambulance service, and if you have the strength, contact your local BBC station. That wait time, if indicative of others for cardio vascular events in your area, is a big story, and you can get journalists to chase it. But only if you're strong enough, and only if you feel you can trust them.

There are still some good guys out there who want to hold feet to the fire when people like you are let down. x

Google ‘make a complaint … xx your region eg east of englangxx ambulance service.

There is an official form to complete. You can also speak to the coroner’s officer. The medical examiner at the hospital will usually speak to family to ask if there are any concerns and they feed these back to the hospital and coroner. Has the medical examiner’s office been in touch when they wrote the death certificate ?

I’m very sorry for your loss. I wonder if he had recorded next of kind details on his NHS record or not. Not everyone does this . It is not always possible to find the next of kin details on an NHS record . I appreciate that the police could go found to a house though if they know the address. No good if the person lives alone though.