Mathew's story
This blog is written by Mathew, a Just Treatment Patient Leader based in Leicestershire.
In July 2022 I lost the person I loved most in the world - my dear mum Jackie. At 78 years old, she was left waiting in pain for an ambulance for 11 hours. If help had come sooner, it’s possible she might still be with us today. Whilst I’ll never know this for sure, one thing I do know is that she deserved so much better than those long hours waiting for help to come. In her memory, I am telling our story in order to stop this from happening to other families in future.
It was 10 July, 2022. Mum had a nasty fall at her home in Barwell in Leicestershire as she was getting out of bed to go to the toilet. She’d fallen before, so she had a community alarm. She pressed that, the council then alerted me and I went to her house with a friend.
She said she’d hurt her ribs, so we didn’t try to move her, because you’re told not to. My friend called for an ambulance at 5:01am and they said the wait could be up to 10 hours – but they didn’t think it would be anywhere near that long. As it turned out, help wouldn’t come in any form until 4pm - 11 hours after an ambulance was first called.
Mum spent that time on the floor, in pain and stripped of dignity. She kept asking me when help was coming, and I didn't know how to answer. It was devastating to see her in that situation, with no idea of when she'd get the care she urgently needed.
I do not blame our health workers, who are being put in impossibly difficult situations. The paramedics treated mum with such kindness and compassion when they finally did reach us on that day. But they simply do not have the time, capacity and resources they need to do their job properly and safely.
These pressures go far beyond just the ambulance service, too. I later found out that on the day mum had her fall, ambulances were in fact backed up outside the Royal Infirmary, our nearest hospital, and the reason they were backed up was because they couldn’t offload patients because there were patients in beds with no care package for them at home. It was a whole system failure.
After more than a decade of cuts, underfunding and fragmentation, the NHS is in crisis. Labour has inherited this dreadful situation, but what matters now is the decisions they take moving forward. Wes Streeting met me when he was the shadow health secretary – and I’ll always be grateful that he made that time. He was very sad to hear about what had happened to my mum and pledged that if he got into government he’d work to fix the NHS.
However, I am concerned when I hear him talk about increasing the use of the private sector as a supposed solution to this crisis. My view is that whenever you use the private sector, you further limit the capacity of the NHS as a public service, as private providers rely on NHS-trained staff to function and cherry pick the most “simple” patient cases.
I also worry when I hear Labour refusing to commit to meaningfully increased investment in our struggling NHS. The fact is our health service has lost out on hundreds of billions in funding that it should have had if spending had kept up with historic averages. We now lag behind similar European countries on health spending to the tune of around £40bn a year.
I know this is a lot of money. But some things are worth investing in - and the health and lives of our loved ones should surely be at the top of the list. There are ways to generate this funding: specifically, a progressive tax system that asks those with the broadest shoulders to pay a wee bit more and uses that money to properly invest in the NHS.
This is what millions of us want to see from this government, and that’s exactly what I will continue fighting for. It doesn’t get any easier to talk about what happened to mum, but she didn’t like to see injustice. I know that she would want me to fight for change for our NHS.