East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust

4. Mrs A complains about the Trust’s handling of her father’s 999 call in early December 2022, which she says caused his avoidable death.

5. Mrs A says the Trust incorrectly categorised her father’s 999 call, which added to the time delay in processing the call and dispatching the ambulance. She says the ambulance arrived over ten hours after he made the first call and by this time, he had died.

6. Mrs A says the Trust is poorly run which caused her family to experience the consequences of her father’s early death. She says she needs bereavement counselling for her mental health. She would like the Trust to improve its triage system, review the length of time it takes to process serious incident reports and to apologise. She would also like a financial payment.

7. Mrs A’s father had type one diabetes and had been vomiting every few hours for several days. His breathing was shallow and he was confused when he made the first 999 call.

8. Mrs A says the Trust triaged him and assigned his call to response category five, which was then manually upgraded to response category three, which usually has a waiting time of up to two hours. She also says the Trust told her father not to call back unless his symptoms got worse.

9. The Trust made welfare calls to Mrs A’s father which went unanswered. Although it was escalated internally, the Trust never made any further follow up calls or explored other solutions.

12. The law says we cannot investigate a complaint where a person has (or had) the option to take legal action, unless we consider this is (or was) unreasonable in the circumstances. We do not consider whether legal action would succeed but whether it would be a reasonable option to look in to.

13. Mrs A is claiming medical negligence led to her father’s death. This is a matter for a court as we cannot make findings of clinical negligence.

14. Mrs A told us she has spoken to a solicitor, but they would not take her claim on. While we understand why she has come to us after this advice, we think given her claims of negligence and the fact she wants substantial compensation for an avoidable death, it is in her best interests to explore getting legal advice and to speak to more solicitors.

15. Mrs A could also get advice from an advocacy service about which solicitors specialise in these types of claims.

16. The time limits for taking legal action are strict. Mrs A needs to explore this option by getting legal advice while she still has time.

17. Mrs A can come back to us once she has fully explored the legal route if legal action has not been possible or has not achieved all the outcomes she wants.

18. We understand how Mrs A’s experience caused her and her family great distress and the difficulties she was left with as a result. We hope this statement clearly explains our decision.

1. We have carefully considered Mrs A’s complaint about East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust (the Trust). We are sorry to hear about the circumstances of her father’s death and how it has affected her.

2. Having considered the evidence and what Mrs A told us, we think she could take legal action on the matter she has brought to us. This is because we cannot make findings of clinical negligence and a court may be better placed to deal with this and achieve the outcomes she is looking for. We have decided not to take any further action for this reason.

3. We are sorry for any more distress this may cause but we hope our reasoning below explains how we have reached this decision. We also hope she is able to get the outcomes she wants by taking a legal route.