MORE resources are needed for the ambulance service in Somerset, says a Wiveliscombe man who says a pensioner spent about three hours lying injured in a road after a fall waiting for a crew to arrive.

Ralph Matcham, of Spring Gardens, said the man, who he knew by sight, was walking with his wife when he fell. He said: “I saw the man, who is aged about 70, go base over apex – whether he tripped, I don’t know. He dragged his wife down with him and she was battered about the face.”

Mr Matcham said a nurse who had been looking after someone else saw what happened and phoned for an ambulance. Neighbours went to comfort the man and found a chair for his wife to sit on, and Mr Matcham called on a First Responder who lives nearby to help.

After about half an hour the nurse phoned again for an ambulance but Mr Matcham said she was told ‘they were very busy and not to keep phoning’.

The First Responder, who was joined by a colleague, phoned about an hour and a half later and was told an ambulance was on its way but a heart attack case had delayed it. Eventually, about three hours after the pensioner fell over, just before the 11.30pm on the July evening, the ambulance turned up.

Mr Matcham said: “The medical side was okay with the First Responders there but before they arrived we didn’t know what to do. There was blood everywhere after the man had obviously banged his head. In the end it wasn’t overly serious but we weren’t to know that.

“We couldn’t have asked for a better service when the crew arrived – they were excellent. And the First Responders were excellent. It was just that the ambulance took so long to get there.”

Mr Matcham added: “We in Somerset are obviously short of ambulances. I can’t understand why managers aren’t raising merry hell with the Government about the lack of ambulances due to funding cutbacks.”

He told the story to the WWN after reading elsewhere about an 82-year-old man who had to wait more than two hours for an ambulance after falling over in High Street, Taunton, on a weekday lunchtime last week.

The South Western Ambulance Service said the wait was due to a high volume of calls which it said were addressed in order of priority.

A South Western Ambulance Service spokesman said: “The name of the patient and the location of the incident were not supplied, so we have not been able to track down the incident in question, but will investigate further if more details can be provided.

“We only have a finite number of resources available to respond to the ongoing rise in demand for our services and are handling an additional 470 incidents every day than we were five years ago.”