Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said he wants to meet with Samantha Morris whose husband Aaron died after an ambulance service failure and neglect.
A coroner last week concluded that failings and neglect on the part of the North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) contributed to 31-year-old Aaron’s death on his wife’s birthday on July 1, 2022, adding it was “highly likely” the dad-of-five would have survived with timely treatment.
Samantha - who was 13 weeks pregnant with twins - came across the crash in Esh Winning, County Durham, on the way home from the hospital on her birthday and had to direct an ambulance driver to the nearest hospital because he didn’t know how to get there. That ambulance should have arrived 18 minutes after the first 999 call, but did not arrive for 55 minutes.
Mr Streeting said: “This is such an unbelievably tragic case – my heart goes out to Aaron’s family.
"I cannot imagine what they are going through in losing someone they love, especially in these circumstances and also knowing that had an ambulance been there on time that may well have made the difference.
“There are too many cases whether it’s an ambulance not arriving on time or getting a diagnosis too late – that can be the difference between life and death. We cannot go on like this."
On hearing of Mr Streeting's offer, Samantha said: "I am happy that the health secretary has made the offer and is making the effort to speak with me directly about my husband, Aaron and his inquest."
Concluding the inquest at Crook Coroners' Court last week Senior Assistant Coroner Crispin Oliver said: “It is highly likely that Aaron Morris would have survived had available specialist medical treatment been applied in a timely manner.”
He said this was down to the “delayed allocation of an ambulance to deploy to the scene due to overstretched resources [and] the failure of the ambulance service clinical team leader to deploy to the scene when there was certainly enough information for her to do so at 12.52.pm”.
Speaking outside court last week Samantha called on the Government to back the ambulance service with greater funding,
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“NEAS has done everything they can (to make changes) but now the Government need to back them,” she said.
“The Government need to make sure they’ve got the funding to keep the trauma desk going ahead and all of these extra members of staff but it's also the public not misusing the ambulance service so the resources are going to the correct people.”
A private ambulance contracted by NEAS attended Aaron on the day he died. His 999 call was one of 65 in a pile awaiting a response.
The Northern Echo revealed earlier this year that the service spent more than £15.4m calling in third-party firms to attend incidents on its behalf in the year Aaron died.
Mr Streeting added: “For the last four months we’ve hit the ground running with a combination of investment and reform that the NHS needs. It’s not just so it’s back on its feet, but to also make sure it’s fit for the future and to make tragedies like this much less likely.”
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