‘Ambulance delays made me a widow at 28’

The wife of a motorcyclist who could have been saved after a crash, had it not been for an ambulance delay, has spoken of her pain at being a widow aged 28.

Aaron Morris, 31, died about six hours after colliding with a car on 1 July 2022 in Esh Winning, County Durham.

His widow, Samantha Morris, said she felt “pain and sadness” that even though she had been with him, she had not held his hand because she did not realise he was dying.

The North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) said lessons had been learned and it had taken “a number of actions” after Mr Morris’ death.

An inquest held last week in Crook, County Durham, heard it had taken 54 minutes for an ambulance to get to the scene due to high demand.

It also heard Mr Morris’ chance of survival would have been about 95% had he been treated sooner.

However, a specialist paramedic, known as a clinical team leader (CTL), was not deployed to the crash.

Mrs Morris, who was pregnant with twins at the time of her husband’s death, said: “I shouldn’t be a single parent to three children, that wasn’t the plan. I shouldn’t be widowed at 28.

“There’s a lot of pain and sadness, especially at this time of year, coming up to Christmas.”

She told the BBC how she came across the crash scene by chance while returning from a hospital appointment.

She said: “I saw there was an accident on the road, picked up my phone to call Aaron to say I was going to stop and see if they needed a hand. But then I looked again and saw it was Aaron.

“I thought he’d broken a few ribs and obviously had some internal injuries, but I thought… ‘it doesn’t really matter what’s wrong with him, when he gets to the hospital they’ll fix him’.”

Not realising how serious her husband’s condition was, she said she had spent time helping the ambulance crew.

“I did not know he was going to die and instead of holding his hand while the paramedics worked on him, I was running for equipment, I was running for scissors, I was cutting his clothes,” she said.

Coroner Crispin Oliver concluded it was “highly likely” Mr Morris, who suffered a cardiac arrest, would have survived had available specialist medical treatment been applied in a “timely manner”.

NEAS medical director Dr Kat Noble said the service “unreservedly apologised”.

“We accept that opportunities were missed to deploy a clinical team leader to this incident,” she said.

“The service fully accepts the coroner’s findings and has taken a number of actions as a result of its investigations.”

Mrs Morris said she took comfort from the fact the ambulance service had learned lessons from her husband’s death.

“They looked at every single thing that went wrong that day, including the way the calls were handled and retrained staff,” she said.

“Every mistake that was made, they have looked at in-depth and made a change for every single one.

“They’ve totally rebooted the system to try and make sure it never happens again.”

She said her main focus now was “remembering the good times with Aaron”, adding: “I want to smile and have happiness in our lives.”