Manchester student ‘dismissed during 999 call’ died hours later

22 comments

1. Shocking negligence from the ambulance service.

   Why is this downvoted? I guess the article isn’t about immigrants.

2. What an awful story. Condolences to the young gentleman’s family. What happened to our country ? 😭

3. > “When Joel tried to pick Josh up he started screaming in pain – he couldn’t walk.

   > “And still the ambulance proceeded to say they wouldn’t come because they didn’t think it was serious.

   > “So then that’s when they told him to go get the paracetamol.”

   > When Daniel arrived he found his younger brother “unresponsive”.

   > Daniel said it was at this point that emergency services arrived to the student accommodation – and Joshua was pronounced dead two hours later.

4. I had similar with 111. Excruciating abdominal pains in the middle of the night. Was told by 111 it was likely indigestion and to get some pepto bismol type stuff from the pharmacy, which my wife did at 7am. By 10am it was getting worse so didn’t bother calling 999 just got an Uber to the hospital (every pothole and bump was causing agony). After some tests at hospital, turned out to be my appendix and I was operated on the next day.

5. The ambulance service have limited recourses, they triage calls depending on the seriousness at the time.

6. Had a similar incident occur with someone I know who was screaming in pain because their insides were on fire and the paramedics came examined them and told them to take paracetamol. They would have died if they didn’t have their blood taken as the lab came back and told them to go to A&E now as they were extremely unwell

7. The ambulance told me to wait TWELVE HOURS or to drag my unconscious ex down 4 flights of stairs and across a courtyard into an uber. They only sent an ambulance when I explained I’m 5’2 and they were nearly 6 foot and a dead weight. I physically couldn’t get them to a hospital alone. If I wasn’t obviously a woman in distress I feel like they’d have left me to work it out.

8. Im not saying this to take away from how tragic and avoidable this was. But the lad had been vomiting after every meal for months and didn’t go to his GP.

   It sounds like the ambulance absolutely should have attended, but why did he assume that was normal 😳

9. Sounds like he was a good lad who had a bright future very tragic didn’t need to happen

10. Im confused the story says the ambulance showed up during the call, the complaint seems to be with the dispatcher but to judge that we would need to know what the brother told them did he say at first his brother had a sore stomach which a dispatcher might question at first?

11. My Mum has now been in hospital for almost 3 weeks after a burst brain aneurism. This could have possibly been caught earlier except the nurse at my local surgery told her to take paracetamol and come back in 10 days if symptoms had not resolved.

12. Poor guy, so young and completely preventable. I can’t wrap my head around why they wouldn’t at least have told him to get to his nearest A + E. 

13. So sad.

    Services are under pressure, but there are also major issues with training. Recently, I had a friend in dire need of an ambulance and was told it would be two hours because he was able to talk. He needed immediate treatment; this was proven when he got to the hospital.

14. I rang 111 when my baby had a rash, temp and was throwing up (I’d been told a few times baby temp being high means go to an and e.) There was about 20 minutes of questions that weren’t relevant. When we got to my ethnicity, my husbands and my child’s I got fed up and said I’m just trying to work out if he needs to go to the hospital, why is this relevant? They said they were just going through a checklist. I hung up and just went to a and e. I know ethnicity can be relevant to diagnosis in some conditions, but not during an emergency with a baby. It was so frustrating to feel like their data collection work was more important than giving me advice.

15. People don’t understand how stretched the emergency services are financially, it’s so shocking, if I didn’t see it myself from working for them, I wouldn’t believe it. There are situations where there are multiple emergencies that SHOULD be attended, but you literally don’t have the units to send to all of them, so you have to triage which needs the ambulance more. This is a very sad case, but you can imagine some of the other situations they had to choose to go to rather than this. There is far too many people in the country and far too many people who take advantage of the benefits system. It’s completely unsustainable, the ambulance and the police desperately need more staff, and they simply don’t have the funding, just when you think it can’t get any worse, you hear if more forced redundancies. The people in charge of the country need to wake up, and review the benefits system to make sure it’s only supporting the people who are truly in need.

16. A young lad is dead yet people are stating that it is because of the colour of skin!!

    Absolutely nothing in the article or by his family even remotely suggested the reason why the person who took his call did not send out an ambulance because of the colour of his skin.

    A young lad is dead, stop using him to push your own agenda, its sickening…

    Also we have no idea why this happened as we do not have the full transcript of the telephone conversation.

    Maybe the person who took the call was negligent, maybe nothing said to them suggested that that he required urgent treatment, they can only go on whatever information is given to them.

    Maybe, just maybe you hold on making outrageous statements until we have the full picture

17. Our ambulance system is wildly underfunded. Called for someone on the street OD’ing recently and the ambulance said that because the patient was still breathing, they be about 90 minutes (major city). This is very common – unless you’re not breathing, or have signs of stroke/heart attack, they simply do not have capacity to send an ambulance to you in many major cities, let alone more rural areas. It’s absolutely disgusting for a ‘developed’ nation. Add to that the horrific GP wait times and unjustifiable A&E queues – the NHS has been in a state of failure for a while now.

18. I feel like the NHS is such a postcode lottery. You hear stories like this and elderly people being left for hours and hours after a fall.

    Yet my mum fell and cut her head open the other week. A neighbour called an ambulance and one was there within less than 5 minutes, apparently!

19. The greater Manchester ambulance service left my mother to die too. We only found out after she had died how explicit and specific she was with the call handler. She told them she was dying and they didn’t send anyone for 16 hours. She worked her whole life for the British medical service and they didn’t let her live to see retirement. She would have been 60 last month

20. Think you have an issue? Save the Pennie’s and get the test done privately.

    The fact that the UK does not bother to have annual health checks, X-rays, urine test, blood tests, hearing, sight and a sit down with a doctor is maddening and simply not cost effective in the long run.

    Healthcare and the UK in general is stuck with a reactive mindset, every issue is tackled WHEN it appears. Instead we should be focusing on getting ahead of issues.

21. Is it unfair to suggest that the 999 operator should be charged for their negligence leading directly to a death?

    It feels like an unthoughtful kneejerk reaction, but they basically killed this boy.

22. Shocking but sadly not new for the ambulance service, seen many articles over the last few years, often of old people left with in streets for 8-10 during winter with breaks etc. if the call recording shows it was reported correctly and now reason to doubt that . There should be a internal investigation with repercussions for the people making the decision he was not urgent

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