Ambulance waits of 40 hours as NHS delays worsen - BBC

It took another 14 hours for an ambulance to get to her, leaving her pregnant granddaughter to care for her through the night.

When they arrived the crews were able to give her pain relief and quickly transported her to the Royal Cornwall Hospital.

But there the wait continued - there were around 30 ambulances queuing to handover patients to A&E staff.

It was another 26 hours before she was taken inside to A&E.

She has since received a written apology from the Royal Cornwall for the care provided to her mother in August.

When ambulance crews bring patients to hospital they are meant to be able to handover their patients to A&E staff within 15 minutes.

Rishi Sunak said he will sit down with the NHS "relatively soon" to discuss the issues around ambulance waiting times.

He said more money had also been put into social care to allow people to move out of hospitals and back into their homes.

The College of Paramedics said crews were facing a "perfect storm", with the queues outside A&E preventing them reaching patients who need a 999 response.

Both ambulance response times and A&E waits have hit their worst levels on record in all parts of the UK in recent months.

In Cornwall, patients facing emergencies such as heart attacks and strokes are now waiting more than two hours on average for an ambulance.

A strike by members of the Royal College of Nursing is planned for 15 and 20 December in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, while earlier this week the two main unions representing ambulance staff said their members had also backed walkouts.

The government said the NHS will publish its emergency care recovery plan in the new year, which will set out proposals to improve ambulance response times and A&E performance in England.