大象传媒

David believes his father, Ken Burton wasn't given a fighting chance of survival because there were no ambulances available when he needed one.

The Ambulance Service say on that day, there were significant delays handing over patients in hospital.

In fact the Trust says it lost more than 970 hours of ambulance time and that's the equivalent to taking 81 ambulances off the road.

A West Midlands Ambulance Service spokesman said: 鈥淔irstly, we would like to offer our sincere condolences to the family of Mr Burton for their loss.

鈥淯nfortunately, due to long hand over delays at hospitals, the Trust was under significant pressure at the time. We rely on each part of the health and social care system working together so that our ambulances can get to patients in the community quickly. If our crews are left caring for patients outside hospital, they are not available to respond to the next call as quickly as we would all want.

鈥淲e received an initial call from a GP asking us to take a patient to hospital, however, due to pressure on the service as a result of handover delays, we asked if the patient could make their own way. The patient agreed that they could. We then received a second call from a family member asking us to take the patient to hospital at which the caller was informed an ambulance may be several hours in arriving.

鈥淎 third call was then received informing us that the family were going to take the patient themselves and we could stand down. A fourth and final 999 call was then received to report that the patient was in cardiac arrest and an ambulance was immediately dispatched which took the patient to hospital.鈥�

鈥淲e took the very difficult decision to let people know how long it might be before an ambulance was available based on feedback from serious incidents, patient feedback and comment from groups such as Healthwatch. Sadly, we have seen some very long delays responding to patients due to the hospital handover delays. Families involved in these cases have repeatedly asked us why we didn鈥檛 share this information, so it was the right decision to introduce this new script at times of particular pressure.鈥�

Show less