Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:44 pm on 16 February 2022.
The stories that we hear are frightening: an 89-year-old woman collapsed and lying on the floor for six hours; a farming accident with no ambulance being available at all, so the patient is taken by car with a broken back; a wheelchair-dependent patient suffering a fracture being told to wait three days because it's non-urgent; a woman whose symptoms were deemed to require an emergency response waiting nine hours and an ambulance arriving as her heart stopped. Now, as the Minister says, this is not perhaps an ambulance crisis; it's a whole-system crisis, it's a system that is clogged up, and nobody is angrier about the situation that paramedics and ambulance staff, and our thanks to them is immeasurable. But, let me tell you what I was told by a senior GP recently. They said, 'If I had a family member who required urgent care, I wouldn't even think of calling 999, they'd be straight in the car. If we wanted an ambulance in Wales tonight, there probably wouldn't be one. This doesn't seem like a developed country'. What kind of country are we and when will the penny drop about the need to sort it out if even GPs are saying that we can't help those in most serious need of help?