Abergele 95-year-old died after four-hour Glan Clwyd ambulance queue wait

A 95-year-old died after being kept in one of 11 queueing ambulances outside Glan Clwyd hospital for up to four hours.

Lilly Baxendall had injured herself in a fall at home. It was 42 minutes before an ambulance arrived.

And when paramedics got her to Glan Clwyd hospital , there was a long queue of ambulances waiting to drop off patients.

Miss Baxendall remained in one of them for four hours and her condition deteriorated in the mean time.

She was unconscious by the time she was taken into the hospital, at around 9pm at night, and died soon after.

A postmortem found the cause of death to be a bleed on the brain caused by the fall, and pneumonia.

At her inquest in Ruthin today, the coroner heard evidence from Dr Geoffrey Phillips.

Hundreds of nurses wanted to fill vacancies in North Wales hospitals

Called as an expert witness, he said that although Miss Baxandall might have had a CT scan earlier on September 15, 2015, the outcome would probably have been the same.

Frances Millar, the on-call matron that night, said it was a very busy day and it became “exceptional”.

Huge efforts were made to improve the flow of patients but even Wrexham and Bangor hospitals were full to capacity and unable to assist.

“Everybody was working very, very hard,” she said.

Adam Griffiths, head of nursing for unscheduled care at Glan Clwyd, said things had improved but were still “nowhere near” where they wanted them to be.

Since Miss Baxandall’s death, he said, all patients waiting outside were triaged within 15 minutes and seen by a consultant within 30 minutes.

Asked by the coroner what the current situation was, Mr Griffiths said that on Monday this week there were seven ambulances waiting.

“Luckily for us there was no harm done,” he said.

Both Mr Griffiths and Dr Phillips said one of the problems was finding places for patients to be discharged into social care.

Gary Doherty, who took over as chief executive of the Health Board 12 months ago, also outlined the improvements being made and pointed out that the number of patients kept waiting for over an hour fell by 23% in the first three months of this year compared with the previous quarter.

Asked by the coroner to say what he saw as the answer to the problem had he been able to wave a magic wand, Mr Doherty replied: “Recruitment and retention of staff.”

After recording a conclusion of accidental death on Miss Baxandall, a former catering supervisor at Heathrow Airport who lived at Heol y Fedwen, Belgrano, near Abergele, Mr Gittins said that despite having heard about the steps already taken he felt that more needed to be done and he had to issue a Regulation 28 report to try to prevent future deaths.

He stressed that it called for co-operation among the various agencies, adding: “I am not prepared to allow a situation to arise where it becomes the norm for ambulances to park outside. There is a danger we could come to accept the situation.”

They could not afford to be complacent, he said, but he added: “We have light at the end of the tunnel but we have to ensure that we all work together to reach it.”