My husband died in my arms as we waited too long for an ambulance

‘We can’t afford it.’

That’s what Sir Keir Starmer said when asked whether he would restore NHS junior doctors’ pay if he got into power.

Rishi Sunak has the same position, too.

When I hear words like ‘affordability’ being used in relation to our National Health Service, I get angry. I immediately think about my husband – who died in my arms after an ambulance took too long to arrive, thanks to NHS staff shortages.

Was saving his life too much to afford?

To me, fixing the crisis in our broken NHS and social care system is the issue that matters most in this summer’s election. I know first-hand how much is at stake. 

On Christmas Eve 2022, myself, my husband of 36 years, Iqbal, our daughter Sana and her children were excited to be spending Christmas together in a rented cottage in Hereford.

On arriving at the house Iqbal started to complain of shoulder pain and feeling sick, he looked pale and was sweating excessively. 

I work for the NHS as a Speech and Language Therapist and quickly realised that Iqbal’s symptoms suggested heart problems. 

We first rang 999 at 7:07pm and were put through to West Midlands Ambulance Service. Iqbal was triaged as a category 5 case, requiring a callback with advice from a paramedic or nurse. 

While waiting for a call back Iqbal’s condition worsened. 

We ended up calling 999 again, 40 minutes later, panicking as his eyes had rolled back into his head. This time Iqbal was triaged as category 2 but we were told to wait or bring him into the hospital ourselves.

We tried, but it was impossible to carry him, as Iqbal was in and out of consciousness and not able to support his own weight. 

Later, we found out an ambulance was dispatched, but then diverted to a higher priority call.

We rang a third time at 8.04pm after waiting for almost an hour since the first call. By now his breathing was very laboured. I remember saying to the dispatcher: ‘I think he’s dying, please help us.’ 

While on this final call, my husband stopped breathing.

Guidelines state that an ambulance should have arrived within about seven minutes after the third call. It arrived at 8.28pm.

When the ambulance finally reached us, the paramedics worked to save Iqbal’s life, but it was too late. Iqbal died from heart failure, feeling nobody was coming to help him, and to this day it still haunts me. He deserved help when he needed it the most. 

No NHS patient, in their darkest moments, should feel abandoned like my husband did.

I do not blame the health workers for the failures of that night. I could see that they were also deeply traumatised by what happened. 

I know that every single day they are battling to save lives under impossible pressures, but they simply aren’t being given the support and resources that they need.

Sadly, our family’s story isn’t a one-off. 

It’s estimated that hundreds of patients in England are dying needlessly each week due to delays in emergency care. 

On top of this, the NHS England waiting list currently stands at 7.5million cases. There are over 100,000 staff vacancies in secondary care, and we know from surveys that many more are considering quitting, with stress, workload, staff shortages and pay being the top reasons for leaving.

When it comes to health spending, we lag behind countries such as France and Germany by billions – and are estimated to have spent a fifth less than our European neighbours on health care in the last decade.

Yet, neither the Conservatives nor the Labour Party seem willing to reckon with the scale of this crisis. 

So far in this election, the Conservatives have pledged to build 100 new GP surgeries (though, according to Pulse, 450 practices have closed down under their rule) and will supposedly fund it through further cutting of other areas of the NHS budget. 

Meanwhile, Labour’s flagship policy is to spend just £1.1bn delivering 40,000 extra appointments a week at evenings and weekends. Yet it’s expected that existing NHS staff will be the ones delivering these appointments. 

As someone who works in the NHS, I know for a fact that the workforce is already burnt out and overstretched. Many are already working overtime, the question is: who are the health workers that will deliver these appointments? 

Furthermore, what is the tangible plan to recruit more staff and – crucially – retain them, when we know that pay and conditions are such important factors?

I am not convinced that either Sir Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak has answers to these fundamental questions. 

Now more than ever, we need political leaders who will do what’s necessary to save lives like my husband’s and get our NHS back on the road to recovery. 

This means increasing health spending to match countries like France and Germany, and ensuring our health workers (including junior doctors) get the pay that they deserve.

My message to party leaders is to stop bickering and start delivering. I don’t just want to talk about what the Conservatives have done – we all are already paying the price for that. 

I don’t want more empty promises – I want a pledge to restore the NHS to its former glory.

It’s incredibly painful to talk about what happened to Iqbal, but I’m determined that people know the real-life impacts of not resourcing our NHS properly. That they know the effects that this government has caused on real-life people like me.

Iqbal was a wonderful, generous, caring and funny father, husband, grandfather and person. He shouldn’t have died like that. Nobody should. 

We received an apology from the ambulance service and a root cause analysis meeting was held. The outcome was that Iqbal was failed. 

Since Iqbal died, life has been a weird limbo. I feel traumatised and relive his last hour constantly. I cry and reminisce a lot. 

I also want to fight a lot for the NHS to once again be renowned worldwide for the standard of care it gives to its patients. 

Nothing will ever change what happened to my family, but politicians have the power to stop this happening to other families in future – it’s time that they used it.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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