An ambulance took almost three hours to arrive for a pensioner who had been badly injured in a fall and later died in hospital, an inquest has heard.

Henry Moseley’s wife and their son repeatedly called 999 to tell South Western Ambulance Service (SWAS) that the 78-year-old was deteriorating.

SWAS said 206 hours of vehicle time were lost that night because of delays handing patients over at hospital.

The Assistant Gloucestershire Coroner recorded the death as accidental.

Mr Moseley, from Cheltenham, hit his head on a radiator at his home just after 21:00 on 23 March 2022.

Each time his family called the ambulance service his case was classified as a category 2 emergency, the Gloucester inquest was told.

After his son’s final call, the case was raised to level 1 and an ambulance arrived six minutes later at 23:41.

The response time for a category 2 emergency should be a maximum of 40 minutes in at least 90% of cases – but the average should be only 18 minutes, the inquest was told.

Mr Moseley died at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital on 4 April from a bleed in the brain that he had suffered in the fall.

Assistant Gloucestershire coroner Roland Wooderson said: “The ambulance trust acknowledges that it was not able to respond to Mr Moseley within the category 2 targets.”

He said the trust had explained that the delay was due to “demands on the service” and the fact that 206 hours of ambulance time was lost because of handover delays at hospital.

The target for handing a patient over from ambulance to hospital was 15 minutes but was taking an average of three hours and 39 minutes that night, the service stated.

(Source: BBC)

(Image: Wikimedia)