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“Piers, mum had a heart attack…”
It was late in the evening on the 6th of November last year when my sister Charlotte called to deliver the terrible news.
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My mom Gabrielle in the hospital. It was a traumatic night for herCredit: PIERS MORGAN
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I spoke to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak about his NHS promises following my family’s experience
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A nurse told me the hospital was ‘like a bloody war zone’ Credit: The Sun
Our 79-year-old mother Gabrielle was admitted to our local NHS hospital with severe chest pains and tests confirmed a heart attack.
At midnight, she was taken by ambulance to the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton for emergency specialist treatment in their renowned cardiology unit.
Click here to watch Piers Morgan confront Rishi about the NHS and to read the Prime Minister’s response
Or that was the plan.
Instead, after being evaluated upon arrival at the ER, my mother was stuck on a gurney and left in the hallway at 1am to wait for a cardio bed to become available.
And she stayed there for almost seven hours.
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I’ve heard a lot about the shocking state of accident and emergency departments in our country, but it’s only when you have a loved one facing a potential life or death situation that the full horrific reality becomes starkly, painfully apparent.
Charlotte stayed with my mother all night and grew more and more horrified and appalled by what she was witnessing, sending regular messages of stunned disbelief.
“It’s like a bloody war zone in here!” she exclaimed at one point.
“The whole ER is complete chaos. There must be 40-50 patients stuck on gurneys, each ward is three deep and many are out in the corridors.
“Most of them are elderly people themselves, and many are suffering from extreme discomfort, crying or vomiting. The old people are begging for bottles to urinate in, it’s terrible!”
My mother’s blood pressure was raging dangerously out of control and she was understandably terrified of what might happen to her, but she lay unseen and unattended by medical staff from 1am to 4am.
That’s a very long three hours for anyone who knows they’ve had a heart attack and thinks they might be dying.
All the vending machines were also down, so no chance of even a comforting cup of tea or anything to eat.
At one point, her heart monitor’s battery died because there were no electrical outlets in the hallway close enough to charge it, and it was 15 minutes before the monitor was replaced.
Later, the new one also ran out, which led to another 15-minute wait. On both occasions only Charlotte noticed.
My mother found these pauses in the heart monitor particularly terrifying, for obvious reasons.
Devices around other carts kept going off, most of which went unnoticed.
Not to blame the overburdened medical staff, who were insanely busy all night and simply couldn’t cope with the sheer volume of patients – and it wasn’t even the weekend!
Finally, at 4:20am the medical registrar saw my mother, said her blood pressure was very high and would need medication to bring it down, and promised to take her to the cardiology ward ‘soon’.
Another three hours passed.
Again, remarkably, no one else checked her. Not even asking if she was feeling okay, or seeing if she wanted water, or anything.
Every hour my sister asked for blood pressure medication – but none was given.
Meanwhile, carts continued to pile up in the hallways.
It wasn’t until the porters arrived shortly before 8am that my mother was taken to the cardiology ward.
‘Trauma was etched on her face’
When she got there, everything changed and she received extraordinary treatment.
I arrived shortly afterwards and can confirm that the care she – and all the other patients up there – received from everyone on the ward was kind, caring and extremely efficient.
But the trauma of what my mother went through in the ER was etched on her haggard face.
As I said to Rishi Sunak, this is a woman who has worked very hard all her life, paid all her taxes and has always been a huge supporter of the NHS.
But no one, let alone an elderly lady, should be stuck in a wheelchair in a public corridor for seven hours after a heart attack in modern Britain.
It is undignified, humiliating, disturbing and frightening.
Yet hundreds of thousands endure this madness every year, and many do not survive it.
Recent figures from NHS England revealed that a staggering 420,000 patients had to wait more than 12 hours on a trolley in A&E last year, a 20% increase on 2022.
It is also by far the highest number since records began in 2011, when then-Prime Minister David Cameron promised: “I refuse to go back to the days when people had to wait hours to be seen in the emergency room… so let me be perfectly clear: we will not .”
And the Health Service Journal estimates that long emergency room waits caused up to 30,000 deaths from April 2022 to July 2023.
Fortunately, my mother did not end up as one of those grim, unforgiving statistics.
She was rushed into surgery, had a stent put in to fix the 99% blocked artery that caused the heart attack, returned home within 48 hours and is now recovering well.
‘Rishi failed – now it’s all on him’
She has lived through the worst and then the best of our NHS.
At its best, it’s a magnificent service full of incredibly skilled people who should make us all extremely proud.
But the huge and ever-increasing waiting lists for treatment – 7.6 million and growing – and the appalling state of our A&E departments are a shameful disgrace.
A year ago, the prime minister promised to reduce waiting lists in 2023 and take “urgent action” to tackle the chaos of emergency services.
He has failed to do either and must do better if he is to win the next election.
- Watch the full interview on the Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel on Monday at 2pm and on TalkTV at 8pm on Monday
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It is clear that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has failed to deliver on his NHS promiseCredit: PA
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I don’t blame the overwhelmed medical staff at Royal Sussex, they just couldn’t cope Credit: Connors Brighton
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