A 79-year-old grandmother has passed away after waiting more than thirteen hours for an ambulance to arrive to deal with her emergency. Jean Frickel became a victim of the health care system after the emergency dispatchers were stuck trying to deal with an additional sixty-one “threat to life” calls that were made before Frickel called in her emergency. According to a report published by Daily Mail, Frickel’s husband called the emergency service department after the beloved grandmother suffered from heart problems and breathing issues while at home in Flintshire, Wales, United Kingdom, during the December 2023 incident.

Emergency services dispatchers told Frickel’s husband that they had to wait for an ambulance as the emergency service was experiencing severe delays. Instead of growing impatient, Frickel and her husband decided to wait patiently for the ambulance to arrive at their home in Wales.

However, the ambulance did not arrive in time to save Frickel from her heart problems. Instead, Frickel’s husband called the emergency services dispatcher back the following morning to tell them that his wife had stopped breathing. At this point, emergency services finally arrived – within five minutes of this second call – and pronounced Frickel dead inside her home.

Now an inquest into Frickel’s death has revealed that the emergency department was slammed during the time that Frickel needed an ambulance.

Leaders of the ambulance service said that Frickel’s case was considered an “amber one” since her call indicated that there was a threat to her life. However, Frickel’s case was not the only one at the same time. The dispatch leader said that there were sixty-one other calls in the same category as Jean Frickel’s.

Gillian Pleming, from the Welsh Ambulance Service Trust, said: “The initial wait for 13 hours is not the standard WAST wants to apply to patients, but due to significant handover delays at hospitals, we were unable to get to Mrs. Frickel sooner.”

Unfortunately, Consultant Richard Cowell revealed that Jean Frickel of Buckley, Flintshire was near the point of death. If an ambulance had arrived in time to save her life, she might have survived “a few more weeks,” but she was in the process of dying.

Frickel had been married three times during her seventy-nine years of life.

Her daughter, Helen Underhill, said that while her mother was “extremely” unhealthy, her death came “a little bit too soon” for her family.

Coroner Katie Sutherland also appeared at the inquest. She said that after hearing Pleming’s warning, she feared that more people would die as a result of delays in an ambulance service’s arrival.

Sutherland said, “Despite assurances of change, the issue still remains, and the multi-factorial issues involve not just the ambulance service but the health boards, the local authorities, and social care. “

She added, “Due to the time it took for the ambulance to arrive, Jean Frickel was denied the opportunity for possible life-extending treatment at hospital… Due to the time it took for the ambulance to arrive, Jean Frickel was denied the opportunity for possible life-extending treatment at the hospital.”