A son whose mum endured an 11 hour wait for an ambulance before dying from sepsis has slammed Keir Starmer’s 10-year NHS plan. Mathew Hulbert, 45, says he will never forget the hours, Jackie, 78, laid on the floor of her home in Barwell, Leicestershire, after suffering a fall in 2022. Mr Hulbert, a community centre coordinator, said: “As you can imagine my dear mum became more and more distressed as the time went by. She repeatedly asked me when help was going to come and it was devastating not to be able to reassure her.
“All I could do every number of hours was call 999 again and stress the seriousness of the situation. Tragically the NHS which I so believe in, let my mum and our whole family down on that dreadful day.” He added: “There’s just no way of knowing if my mum would still be here today if the ambulance had been able to get to her much sooner.
“Of course it is a question I regularly ask myself, but I try not to as I’ve no way to answer it. One thing is for certain, though, eleven hours lying in pain, in an undignified state, on her bedroom floor, certainly didn’t in any way help matters.
“Although increasingly frail my mum still enjoyed much in her life, from her grandchildren, meeting up with friends, and attending church. She would have carried on with these things had she still been with us, I’m sure.”
“It doesn’t go anywhere near far enough,” the former Liberal Democrat councillor said of Labour’s NHS plan. “It’s tinkering around the edges.” Sustained investment, at the level of the European average, is needed, and an end to the “increased use of privatisation”, he added.
Mr Hulbert also mentioned research by UNISON published in April that concluded that 68% of ambulance workers reported patients’ health deteriorating during long waits and 5% said people have died in their care because of long delays in being admitted to hospital wards.
He added: “I’m very sad to say that there is indeed still a problem with unacceptable ambulance delays and, if anything, the situation has gotten worse under this new Government. They say they are going to put in investment to sort things out but, to be blunt, I’ll believe it when I see it.
“Successive governments haven’t done anywhere near enough to act on this and I don’t have much faith that this new government will be any different. I hope, for the sake of other families, that I’m proven wrong. Because no one should have to go through what my wonderful mother did.”
The Express has approached Labour and the Government for comment.
Mathew and other campaigners from Just Treatment placed a bench in memory of loved ones who had passed away amid delays in front of Labour’s HQ in Southwark on Friday.
Yesterday, Sir Keir Starmer said the “future already looks better for the NHS”, as he published the Government’s plan to improve the service.
It sets out a series of measures to bring care much closer to people’s homes, thereby reducing the reliance on hospitals and A&E.
The proposals would mean fewer staff working in the NHS than previous projections said were needed, with far more providing care closer to home and fewer working in hospitals.
Key reforms include a greatly enhanced NHS app to give patients more control over their care and more data at their fingertips, new neighbourhood health centres open six days a week and at least 12 hours a day, and new laws on food and alcohol to prevent ill health.
The Prime Minister said: “It’s all down to the foundation we laid this year, all down to the path of renewal that we chose, the decisions made by the Chancellor, by Rachel Reeves, which mean we can invest record amounts in the NHS.”
He added: “I’m not going to stand here and say everything is perfect now, we have a lot more work to do and we will do it.
“But let’s be under no illusions: because of the fair choices we made, the tough Labour decisions we made, the future already looks better for our NHS.
“And that is the story of this Government in a nutshell.”