Jayne's emergency: a call for change
Jayne, 63, lives in Wiltshire.
In early September, Jayne suspected she had a kink in her bowel. She’d been hospitalised with this condition earlier in the year, and her consultant told her to dial 999 if the symptoms flared up again.
Jayne’s symptoms started as a stomach ache and vomiting but quickly turned into much more severe discomfort.
Despite being in severe pain and distress, Jayne couldn’t get an ambulance to take her to hospital.
“It crescendo-ed into an acute pain,” Jayne explained. “It was incapacitating and very worrying.”
Jayne rang 999, but the operator said it wasn’t an emergency and told her to call 111. The 111 operator said no ambulances were available and told her to make her way to hospital under her own steam.
Jayne is on benefits and can’t afford to pay for a taxi for the 30-60-minute drive to her closest A&E. Instead, and despite being in severe pain, she had to knock on a neighbour’s door to ask for a lift.
"When you’re in pain like that, you can’t do anything. I was just in such a state, I just burst into tears when my neighbour said she’d take me.”
Once at A&E, Jayne approached the reception ‘doubled over in pain and almost screaming’. She was triaged quickly and ended up spending nearly a week in hospital.
Jayne’s now at home and recovering well, but the whole experience knocked her confidence that she can rely on the ambulance services in an emergency. She thinks that more resources need to be available for clinical services.
“My feeling is that there’s too many layers in the health service,” Jayne says. “They need to get the hierarchy onto the front lines to see what is really going on.”
Jayne's story was published in the Guardian on 12 January 2025.
