Nine hours and 52 minutes: did Dave Strachan’s ambulance wait cost him his life?
On the evening of 15 March 2022, Dave Strachan woke up with chest pains and difficulty breathing.
His wife, Lucille, called 999 and asking for an ambulance. Was Dave breathing, the call operator asked. Yes, but he has chest pains and he’s cold, said Lucille. The call operator asked her to monitor Dave, to tell them every time he took a breath, information which was then fed into a computer.
Lucille was told the ambulance would take about four hours to arrive.
Just before 7am, after a wait of more than seven hours, an ambulance finally pulled up to the gate. “I thought: ‘Thank God.’” says Lucille. “But before the two men got out of the ambulance, another call came in and they said: ‘We’ve got to go.’ I said: ‘What do you mean, you’ve got to go?’ They said: ‘Because we haven’t put our foot out of the cab, we have to obey orders and go to another case.’ I said: ‘Dave is really ill.’ They were embarrassed. One of them said: ‘I’m so sorry, this is a red call.’"
Eventually, at 9.10am, nine hours and 52 minutes after Lucille’s first call, the ambulance arrived.
Dave died of acute myocardial infarction and coronary artery atheroma. At the inquest last year, the coroner concluded that, “The time it took for an ambulance to be dispatched and arrive and convey him to hospital meant that there was a missed opportunity to have probable life-saving medical treatment.” In other words, he probably should be alive today.
After Dave’s inquest, the coroner wrote a Report to Prevent Future Deaths, copies of which were sent to both the Welsh Ambulance NHS Trust and the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which provides NHS services in north Wales. The report highlighted areas of concern and two reasons for the delay were given.
First was that, “All available resources were managing incidents of a higher acuity or the same category but registered prior.”
The other reason why it took so long for Dave’s ambulance to come, wrote the coroner, was that “there were significant handover delays across all Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board sites.” If an ambulance crew is unable to hand over a patient at the hospital, it can’t go and pick up the next one. “Deaths are occurring and will continue to occur as a result of delayed ambulance attendances caused by these multifactorial issues.”
Lucille makes it clear she doesn’t blame anybody personally. At the end of the inquest, one of the paramedics spoke to her. “A junior ambulance lady, who hadn’t been there for very long, came over and said: ‘I want to apologise, I’ve been having sleepless nights about this.’ I said: ‘Well, you can stop that right now, Dave would not want that.’”
Nor does she blame anyone at the hospital Dave was taken to. “There was a highly trained specialist waiting in an operating theatre, and the theatre staff, all waiting for him, but he couldn’t get there. It’s the system and the organisation that’s at fault.”
Source: The Guardian, 13 November 2024