Edinburgh woman told she could wait 4 hours for an ambulance after husband suffered a stroke
A woman whose husband had suffered a stroke was told it could take an ambulance more than four hours to reach them despite a target response time of 16 minutes.
Simone Robb was shocked at the length of time they might have to wait. She said: "Stroke awareness is far and wide now, with the FAST acronym - Face, Arms, Speech and Time critical.”
When she first dialled 999 after husband Steven's stroke at their home in Trinity on the afternoon of July 8, she was told there was an average delay time of one hour in the Edinburgh area.
"I said I can't wait that long, so I hung up. Steven's left side had completely gone.
"I had to get my next door neighbour - he's a nurse - and he made a second phone call and he told them yes, he's definitely had a stroke, and they quoted him 4 hours 30 minutes to 4 hours 50 minutes. He said you can't leave a stroke patient that long and he hung up.
“I had to run around my street, knocking on doors to find younger people to try and help get my husband down the stairs, because I thought I was going to have to drive him to the hospital myself. We live in a street where it's mostly quite old people, but I found two neighbours just to get him downstairs.
"I was getting the car out of the garage and just as I brought the car round, the ambulance arrived and they took him.
"If they had been a few minutes later, we would have been off in my car, trying to get my husband to the Royal Infirmary in rush hour traffic at 6pm on a Tuesday night. Goodness knows what would have happened."
She said Steven, 52, was now making a good recovery. "As soon as he got to the hospital they assessed him and he had to get the clot-busting drug. He was in a real bad way. He had one of the most disabling strokes you can get. They're amazed at how well he has recovered, and how quickly. He couldn't walk - he had to learn to walk again. But it could have been so much worse."
Simone is full of praise for the ambulance crew who took Steven to the Infirmary. "They were absolutely fantastic and they got him to the hospital in 11-12 minutes flat."
But she is angry at the way her emergency call was handled. She said: "The FAST acronym is promoted everywhere. And the sooner you get to the hospital and get thrombolysis or thrombectomy [dissolving or cutting out a blood clot] the better chance of a full recovery you've got. But then you're phoning an ambulance in your time of need, when you've got a life-changing event happening in front of your eyes, and they completely let you down and think it's acceptable."
She made a complaint to the Scottish Ambulance Service, but after investigating, it said the call handlers had followed the process correctly. The service stressed that the times given to callers were average delays, based on real-time geographical information, and not estimated times of arrival. This was intended to allow callers to make “informed decisions” on whether there was a better way of getting to hospital.
A spokesperson for the Scottish Ambulance Service told the Evening News: "We would like to apologise to Mrs Robb for any distress caused. On July 8, our service was under significant pressure due to high demand and lengthy patient handover times at the Royal Infirmary averaging an hour.
“Our call handlers advise 999 callers on delays in order to give them the full information so they can make decisions on whether there may be an alternative route to hospital. This information is given as an advisory, not an estimated time of arrival.
“We are sorry that this information was not as clear as we would have hoped and added to an already stressful situation.”
The service said strokes were in the amber category for response, with a target time of 16 minutes. It had received calls for Mrs Robb at 17:22 and 17:33 on the July 8, the ambulance was dispatched at 17.38 and arrived on the scene at 17:50.
But when we asked if it would not have been helpful, since the last thing Simone had been told was it could be more than four hours, to let her know an ambulance was on its way and likely to arrive much earlier than the time quoted, the service said: "It is not possible to provide an estimated time of arrival as an ambulance may get diverted to a more urgent call, for example to a cardiac arrest."