'My dad was left to suffer for 19 hours. It stripped him of his dignity in his final days’

A SERIOUSLY ill 82-year-old man was left waiting 19 hours overnight for an ambulance last year as new data shows emergency response times in Wales are a “postcode lottery’

- ELLA KIPLING

Brian Gough, from Knighton, Powys, fell unconscious after an infection left him unable to take his Parkinson's and heart medication.

During the long delay, Brian’s daughter, Lesley Jones, waited with him, but was forced to watch on helplessly as her dad struggled.

Lesley said she called for an ambulance at 2.30pm, but one did not arrive until 9am the next day. Her father died two weeks later in hospital and never made it home.

She told us: “By the time the ambulance came, he was unconscious, on the verge of sepsis and had to be cut out of his pyjamas as I couldn't move him on my own to clean him up.”

Lesley said the incident was “devastating” as it stripped a “hardworking man” of his dignity at the end of his life.

Brian, a former welder, was a “kind, funny man who loved his family.”

His son, also called Brian, lives in Australia and his dad went to visit him every year up until the tragic death of his wife, Betty, in 2019, which he “never got over”.

During his career, Brian put up farm buildings and made fences and could make “anything out of wood”.

Remembering the “terrible” night they spent waiting for an ambulance, Lesley said: “I was alone with him and he just kept getting worse until he was unconscious and laid in his own mess, I couldn’t lift him to keep him clean. It upset me very much to see my dad so poorly and his dignity taken from him.”

She said during the long wait, her dad was seeing things and crying for his wife, adding: “I could do nothing for the man who had been a giant of a man; someone I looked up to all my life. It was devastating.”

The long wait worsened Brian's condition, Lesley claims. When the ambulance finally arrived, the paramedic gave him fluids intravenously to bring him around, as they said he was on the verge of sepsis.

Even the ambulance workers were “shocked” at how long they had been waiting, Lesley said.