A father-of-four has passed away after being forced to wait for an ambulance to arrive and pick him up for two long hours.
60-year-old David Earle from the UK was a devoted father and a healthcare worker who dedicated his life to working for the NHS.
After the man suffered a cardiac arrest, it took the ambulance more than two hours to arrive at his home and rush him to the hospital. Not only did the father have to wait in pain but it allegedly also took the family three emergency calls to get the required help.
“My children are absolutely distraught. I just feel for what he gave to the NHS, he deserved such a lot better,” Kim Evans, David’s ex-wife, expressed in an interview with the Liverpool Echo.
“Even if he couldn’t have been saved, he could have been given medication to make him more comfortable.”
Shortly after arriving at the hospital, the 60-year-old father succumbed to cardiac arrest.
“I would never attack the NHS, I’ve given my whole life to it, but no one should suffer like that at the end of their life, nobody,” Evans, who works as a nurse, added.
Following the tragic death, the North West Ambulance Service issued an apology to David’s family and admitted falling “short of the standard of service we would expect.”
“The information provided generated a Category 2 response, meaning that we should have attended Mr Earle in 18 minutes,” the service admitted in a letter to Evans.
“This was an exceptionally busy day for us and the number of calls that we were receiving at that time was exceeding our supply of paramedics and ambulances. On this day, we were experiencing some staff shortfalls as a result of sickness and annual leave.”
Apologizing to David’s family was also a NWAS spokesperson who said the service was “very sorry that on this occasion we failed to respond to Mr Earle appropriately.”
“We would like to extend our sincere condolences to Mr Earle’s family and recognize that this must have been a very distressing ordeal for them,” they said.
“When Mr Earle’s family notified us of this incident, it was flagged and recorded as a ‘serious incident’ and as a result, we undertook a thorough investigation.
“The trust did identify areas of learning in the way the call was handled and in the time it took to dispatch an ambulance to Mr Earle. We acknowledge that the care we provided to Mr Earle fell far short of the standard of service we would expect.”
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