Grandmother waited 14 hours for an ambulance after slipping over in the bath

A pensioner had to wait more than 14 hours for an ambulance to come and take her to hospital after she fell at home.

Barbara Crafter, 81, fell in her bathtub at her property in Newport, Gwent.

She was home alone at the time, but concerned neighbours heard her groaning and phoned her family.

Barbara’s daughter, Lesley Morgan, said she was told by the 999 emergency service when she arrived at 7pm that there was a seven-hour wait for an ambulance.

She said that her mum, who has a heart condition, had to wait double that time and suffered a ‘terrible ordeal’ when paramedics turned up at 10am the next day.

There was a further wait for Barbara to be seen by a doctor when she arrived at the hospital.

Lesley said: ‘My mum has a serious heart condition and uses a pacemaker. The stress was not good for her health. I couldn’t move her at first and my mum was crying in agony.

‘I managed to put her on the toilet where she was more comfortable, yet six hours went by, and the ambulance still hadn’t turned up.’

Lesley called for an ambulance again at 1am and said she was told that her mum would be put at the back of the queue as it would be treated as a new call.

She said: ‘So, I called again at 1am and I was told it would be treated as a new call and that my mum would be put at the back of the queue.

‘The ambulance didn’t arrive until around 10am.’

The Welsh Ambulance Service Trust (WAST) has since said that the incident was treated as a new call because the family had originally cancelled the ambulance, before ringing back to say they needed help.

Lesley continued: ‘By the time she was taken to the hospital none of us had any sleep. The system is broken. If you ring 999, you don’t get an emergency response.

‘I’ve had to watch my mum be in pain all night. If you’re a priority patient, you should be setting seen quicker.’

WAST has since apologised, saying Barbara went through a ‘distressing’ period when she was waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

Liam Williams, executive director of quality and nursing at the Welsh Ambulance Service, said: ‘I would like to extend my sincere apologies to Mrs Crafter for what would have been a distressing wait for an ambulance.

‘This is not the standard of service we aspire to deliver, and we recognise that this is not what people expect of us.

‘We will be reaching out to Mrs Crafter and her family to better understand their experience and investigate what happened.’

WAST declined to comment further when approached by Metro.

Recent problems highlighted by reports in Wales said that ambulance crews have been waiting an average of two hours outside hospitals to hand over patients.

A Freedom of Information request (FOI) by BBC Wales found 23,334 ambulances waited outside a hospital for at least four hours last year as crews waited to hand patients over.

Crews must stay with their patients until they can be brought in by staff inside the hospital emergency units and nearly 73,000 ambulances were left waiting over an hour in 2024.

WAST executive director Lee Brooks acknowledged public frustrations with ambulance wait times, but said: ‘The time it takes for a patient to move from the ambulance into an emergency department is not directly in our control’.

He said WAST was ‘thinking very differently’ about how it will provide services in the future.

Earlier this month, the Welsh health secretary Jeremy Miles said ambulance response time targets would be overhauled, with major trauma incidents and cardiac and respiratory arrests to be covered by two new categories.

Call centres will also see changes to the questions asked so that fewer patients are classed as being in a ‘life-threatening’ situation when this is not the appropriate assessment.

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