A new report reveals a catalogue of blunders by East Midlands Ambulance Service, including the death of a Lincolnshire patient who sustained a head injury when an ambulance veered off the road and crashed.
The report says the ambulance that ran off the road with a patient on board was travelling at normal speed.
EMAS has owned up to its mistakes over the last year, saying it has done so because it is an “open and honest organisation which proactively encourages and supports staff to report serious incidents and near misses”.
Another patient, who was vomiting blood, was taken first to a hospital that could not admit him and stopped breathing on the way to the next hospital. A paramedic was suspended from active duties pending an investigation.
There were 53 incidents in all, but six were downgraded following investigation and six were reported as near miss and no harm done.
Cases on the list include:
nA patient with a suspected broken neck falling off the ambulance stretcher;
nA four-hour delay in reaching a woman who took a drug overdose – she later died;
nA ten-hour delay in allocating an ambulance to an 89-year-old man who had fallen at home.
Police were called when codeine tablets went missing from two ambulance stations in Lincolnshire, Skegness and Louth, and morphine went missing from ambulances elsewhere.
Sutton Bridge has had a catalogue of late ambulance arrivals and councillor Chris Brewis said the report shows the depth of the crisis for EMAS.
He said: “It really is pretty bad.”
EMAS is bottom of the country’s 12 ambulance services for poor response times, but claims a radical shake-up will improve that.
But Coun Brewis says: “They are just shifting the deck chairs around on the Titanic”.
An ambulance paramedic spoke out against the reorganisation, claiming people will die and “suffer unnecessarily”.
The trust plans to shut many of its 66 ambulance stations, including Spalding, and replace them with nine hubs, 19 ambulance stations and 108 community posts. The nearest ambulance station to Spalding will be at Market Deeping, with hubs at Boston and Grantham where ambulances will be maintained and cleaned. Community ambulance posts will be sited at Surfleet, Holbeach and Spalding.