Stroke victim had to wait 80 minutes for an ambulance

Families and patients praise hard-working paramedics but criticise ‘broken system’

(Above) The late Patsy Ennis.

The family of a Ballinagore man who suffered what turned out to be a fatal stroke had to wait 80 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

On the evening of Sunday August 1, Patsy Ennis suffered a stroke at his home in Ballinagore. His son Jarlath told the Westmeath Examiner, that despite being located only 20 minutes from the regional hospitals in Mullingar and Tullamore, his family had to wait an agonising 80 minutes for an ambulance to arrive, more than an hour longer than the response time target of 19 minutes set by HIQA.

“I got a phone call from my mother about half 10 on the Sunday evening. She said your daddy is after having a bit of a turn – come over. I went over and she had him sitting on the couch. He was talking away and said ‘I am fine now, you can all go home’. Then he said, ‘I feel it coming on again’.

“I rang the ambulance and he took the details. He said I will probably have to go to the gate to flag it down and I said that was fine. I am pacing up and down the road, and every second feels like a minute, and every minute feels like an hour. My son then comes across and I go back to the house.

“It’s about three quarters of an hour since I rang the ambulance, so I ring it again.

“The girl said did you ring already? She said it is 20 minutes out on the M6. I said, ‘What is it doing on the M6? Where is it coming from?’

“I go back down to the gate and we are waiting and waiting. Then my son says here is the ambulance. When I look down I see that the ambulance has a Galway registration.

“When the driver gets out I asked he had come from Galway. He said, ‘Not exactly, we came from the far side of Roscommon’.”

Jarlath accompanied his father to Mullingar hospital in the back of the ambulance, but sadly Patsy passed away two days later, on Tuesday August 3. He says that his family can’t help but think that the outcome may have been different if the ambulance response time had been quicker.

“Speed is everything when it comes to a stroke,” he said.

While critical of the system, Jarlath stressed that he and his family are full of praise for the paramedics who treated his father when they eventually arrived.

“The ambulance crew, they were lovely fellas. It’s not the paramedics or any of that, or the doctors or nurses. It’s the government who are not giving them what they need or trying to give them what they need.”

I said to them [the paramedics who treated his father], it’s a knock-on effect. When you are missing out of your jurisdiction, somebody else is missing out of theirs. It goes on and on.

“I heard it on the news a few weeks ago that there were two ambulances sitting in Tullamore with no drivers.”

The Ennis family’s story is one of many that the Westmeath Examiner heard this week when we asked readers for their experiences when ringing for emergency medical assistance. While everyone we spoke to praised the paramedics who treated them, they were critical of an under-resourced system.

Elaine Farrell was 20 minutes outside Mullingar when she went into anaphylactic shock one recent Sunday evening.

A person she was with rang for an ambulance and was informed that it was coming through Enfield.

Elaine was the far side of Mullingar and, as someone who suffers from severe allergic reactions, she knew that time was not on her side: “I am aware of my allergies and I always carry an EpiPen. You have half an hour, I believe, from when you go into anaphylactic shock before you are RIP.”

The emergency call operator stayed on the phone advising Elaine’s companion what to do. When it became apparent that the ambulance would not reach them in time, her companion was advised to drive her to hospital in Mullingar.

“We were on two wheels coming in to Mullingar hospital. I was in and out of consciousness on the journey, I was informed,” she said.

Elaine stressed that her criticism doesn’t lie with the paramedics, but rather with the “broken system”.

“I have nothing but praise for the ambulance men because they stayed on the phone for 20 minutes and they rang ahead to have a doctor await my arrival.

They are amazing. It is the system that is broken, it is not the ambulance, it is not the hospital staff. It is the system that is broken when you are almost RIP and have your life flashing in front of you, to be told there is no ambulance to transport you.”

A spokesperson for the ambulance branch of the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) said: “The ambulance service has faced enormous challenges over the past 18 months given the central role that paramedics have played in the fight against Covid. There is pressure on the service in many parts of the country.

“They [the government] have been pumping resources into the service but we still lag behind services in terms of both manpower and vehicles.”

The Westmeath Examiner contacted the HSE for a statement, but at the time of writing had not received one.