The boss of an NHS trust was driven to A&E by her husband during the pandemic after fearing an ambulance would not arrive in time. Deborah Lee, chief executive of Gloucestershire Hospitals Foundation Trust suffered a suspected stroke during the pandemic.
In a series of tweets, Mrs Lee said she had now recovered but has called for urgent action to be taken by the Government to address the issue. She said: “I can’t get one thing out of my head: What if my husband hadn’t been there and my daughter had called for an ambulance and I’d been put in the Cat 2 ‘stack’?”
Mrs Lee, who has more than 30 years of experience in the NHS, said her husband had heard her “lamenting” ambulance delays, so chose to drive her to A&E when she displayed symptoms of a stroke, rather than call 999. Ambulance response times in England have risen to their worst levels on record, figures show.
The average response time last month for ambulances in England dealing with the most urgent incidents – defined as calls from people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries – was nine minutes and 35 seconds. This is up from eight minutes and 51 seconds in February and is the longest average since current records began in August 2017.
In the South West, where Mrs Lee works, the average response time for a category two call, which includes strokes, is at one hour 53 minutes – the highest in England. The target for that category of call is 18 minutes.
Mrs Lee said that “my system is working unrelentingly” to bring response times down, but added that this was “to no great avail”. She added: “(There is) no silver bullet and I don’t have the answer, but the government has the power to generate one."
She called on the Government to overhaul social care by improving training and pay for staff, adding that it needs to “build a sector that people want to join, stay in and feel proud to belong to”.
