Ambulance waits: Coroner's alert over Wiltshire man's death

A coroner is writing to the government to highlight overlong waits for ambulances following the death of a patient.

It comes after an inquest into the death of Richard Carpenter, 71, from Bromham, Wiltshire, who died after a five-hour wait.

The inquest found that while the wait did not cause his death on 1 December 2021, delays should be looked into.

South Western Ambulance Service said it was working to address such issues.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: "Our sympathies are with Mr Carpenter's wife, family and friends in this tragic case.

"We have seen significant improvements in ambulance response times this year - with average Category 2 response times in 2023/24 over 13 minutes faster than the previous year."

Mr Carpenter was discharged from hospital on 28 November 2021 after elective open heart surgery, but two days later developed severe pain in his back and arm.

His wife, Jeannette, made an initial call for an ambulance at 22:30 GMT on 30 November and then called just after 23:00 GMT to tell the call handler she thought her husband was having a heart attack.

This was then classified as a Category Two call, requiring an ambulance within 18 minutes.

No ambulance came until after 04:00 GMT.

On the night in question there were 42 Category Two calls in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire for ambulances.

Mrs Carpenter was later told her husband's death was caused by a haemothorax - a slow internal bleed from complications due to major heart surgery - but she believes he would have stood a better chance of survival if he had got to a hospital.

During the inquest on Tuesday, Mr Hunaid Vohra, a cardiac surgeon from the Bristol Heart Institute, said it was possible Mr Carpenter might have survived if he had seen him in surgery within an hour of the call.

Wiltshire's coroner David Ridley concluded, despite this, that Mr Carpenter's death was not specifically caused by a long wait for an ambulance, but he pledged to write to the government, suggesting lessons could be learned from the events.

"[Bed blocking] is a problem in terms of discharging from hospital," he said.

"It's still a pressure point and still at a level that presents problems in the NHS."

South Western Ambulance Service has apologised to Mr Carpenter's wife.

Its head of Emergency Operations, Jonathan Knight, painted a picture of a service under extreme pressure amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2021, with only a few clinicians on duty at night to support the emergency call takers in the Emergency Operations Centres covering the region.

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