A mother has been left furious after waiting for nine hours for an ambulance to pick her 4-year-old son who broke his wrist up.
According to Jayne Wright from Maldon, Essex, UK, her son was on a playground when he fell off a slide and broke his wrist.
After requesting an ambulance, however, the mother was told that her son’s case wasn’t an emergency and that they would have to call her back.
Three hours later, Wright received a call only to be told that she and her son, who was crying in pain, should take a taxi that would cost her around $100 instead.
At around 5:20 am, nine hours after Jayne reported the incident, the ambulance finally arrived. As the outraged mother explained, however, the paramedics were “rude” because it was already “the end of their shift.”
Jayne, who aims to become a paramedic herself, added:
“He was crying and screaming and his arm was floppy, but I didn’t want to phone 999 and waste their time. The woman at 111 said she’d make a few phone calls and a clinician would get back to me.
“Sidney was in distress at this point. Some of my friends came round and said this isn’t good enough and they phoned as well.
“The clinician said we must have family or friends who could take us, but I said if I didn’t think he needed to be seen I wouldn’t have rung you. I said this is disgusting, but they said there was nothing they could do about it.”
After the long wait, the paramedics finally showed up. Jayne, however, wasn’t impressed by their performance.
“Two guys from Burnham turned up and they were rude, they made it clear it was the end of their shift,” she added.
“They said they couldn’t assess him and they couldn’t tell if his wrist was broken, they said he needs to have an x-ray. I can understand they’ve been on a late shift but they were so rude.”
As Jayne admitted, things didn’t get any better when the pair arrived at the hospital.
“He had the x-ray and they were giving him morphine because he was in a lot of pain,” she said.
“He’s now got a cast right up to his shoulder and he’s got to have another cast on for six weeks. I’m about to start doing my own paramedics training and I was disgusted.
“Earlier that evening I went and got the paramedic who lives next door to me but Sidney didn’t want to be touched.
“I explained to the clinician over the phone that he couldn’t move his wrist. I was told we would have to wait between one and ten hours and I didn’t understand how this could be happening.
“It could have been anything. If a builder had fallen from eight-foot they would have sent someone out.”
Following the incident, an East of England Ambulance Service representative spoke out and said:
“We are sorry that Sidney and his mother had a long wait for an ambulance.
“This happened at a time of extremely high demand for the service when we were prioritizing patients with life-threatening conditions.”
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