Pensioner left lying on wet ground for three hours waiting for an ambulance

A nurse has blasted the government for failing to invest in the NHS after her 75-year-old mother was left shivering for hours on the cold and wet ground waiting for an ambulance.

Pat McDonald broke her wrist in a fall outside her flat in Birkenhead, Merseyside.

Daughter Katie McDonald said “cuts and lack of investment in our NHS” led to her mother, a former NHS nurse, having to wait for three hours before she was taken to hospital.

The Liverpool Echo reported that Katie rushed to be with her mother but did not want to move her in case of further injuries.

She said a lack of investment in the NHS means wards are being closed because there aren’t enough nurses to staff them.

“This isn’t the North West Ambulance Service’s fault, it isn’t the doctors and nurses working tirelessly at the hospital’s fault,” she wrote on Facebook.

“They are run ragged, stretched beyond belief and trying to do the best they can do with the resources and time they have.

“This is the government’s fault.”

She added: “Can you imagine going into a job to help and care for people and then having to battle every day with no space to care for them, having the weight of 300-plus poorly patients in a department and God knows how many waiting for ambulances on your shoulders, constantly playing ‘who is the least unwell’?

“Just so you can make enough space for the next emergency on their way in, all the while thinking that you are letting the other patients down?

“And this is the result, elderly people in agony, cold, wet, unable to move and left for hours.”

Katie, who works as a nurse clinician in the NHS, thanked the paramedics who arrived to help and urged voters to “get this Tory government out”.

Despite suffering a “nasty” dislocated fracture to her left wrist, which medics “don’t really know what to do with because it’s in that many pieces”, Pat is in good spirits, Katie said.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tweeted: “Pat dedicated her life as a nurse to care for others.

“Thanks to this government, she was left to wait three hours on a cold pavement for an ambulance. This has to end.”

The North West Ambulance Service apologised for the wait and said it “sometimes has more emergencies than we have available ambulances”.

“As well as clinical need, we do take into account the circumstances of the patient and we did our best to get to Ms McDonald as soon as possible,” a spokeswoman said.

Yahoo News has approached the Tories for comment. The party has pledged to recruit 50,000 more nurses but the accuracy of that figure has been ridiculed.

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