999 told a mother to give painkillers to her seriously ill son due to the delay of the ambulance

The mother of a Belfast man who collapsed outside a hospital said she was shocked when a 999 call operator told her she should take painkillers as they would have to wait hours for an ambulance.

Brian Rooney, 35, suffered a heart attack outside the Royal Victoria Hospital emergency department after his bowel ruptured at home.

He is now in an induced coma after emergency surgery in which his intestine was removed.

The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS) apologized to Rooney and his family “for not having met their expectations in terms of the care they provided to him”.

He said he “cannot comment publicly on the details of individual cases” but would “welcome the opportunity to discuss, directly with the family, the issues raised.”

Rooney is in critical but stable condition.

His mother, Isobel Benson, called 999 after her son felt an “explosion” in his chest and was “screaming in agony”.

A hospital consultant later told him that the bowel perforation meant the organ had “effectively exploded and the entire contents of his bowel would have been emptied throughout his body”.

Mr Rooney also suffers from epilepsy, colitis and gout, and has recently been in and out of hospital.

On Sunday morning, Mrs. Benson heard “an almighty scream” coming from her son’s attic room.

After seeing “the panic on his face,” he called an ambulance.

Benson said she explained her son’s medical history and told the operator that he was hyperventilating, in agony and unable to move.

After confirming that he was breathing, lucid and able to talk, he was told it would be a couple of hours before an ambulance could reach him due to continuing pressures on the health service.

When Ms. Benson responded that she needed an ambulance now, the call operator asked her if she could take her son to the hospital herself.

She said she could not because she had a two-door car, which would be extremely difficult for Mr Rooney to travel in given his level of pain, and her child’s father could not drive at night due to his own health problems.

Mrs. Benson was told she would have to wait and simply give him painkillers.

“I was really traumatized after that call. It was unbelievable.

“I understand what a priority call is: if you have severe chest pains, you have priority, that’s an emergency.

“In this case, because he seemed lucid, it was not considered an emergency, and that was the end of it and not up for discussion,” he said.

Mrs. Benson said her son began foaming at the mouth and coughing up blood, so she decided to try to take him to the hospital herself.

“I had to manhandle Brian downstairs. I felt terrible.

“I was in agony and screaming with every movement and turn of the stairs,” he said.

He carried him down two flights of stairs and into his car.

At the doors of the emergency room, his son collapsed.

He said security and then medical staff came out and “cut off his shirt and started giving him CPR because his heart had stopped.”

Benson said the ED consultant told him that if they hadn’t gotten to the hospital when they did, “we’d be dealing with a dead body right now.”

She said she understood the pressures on the health service but never thought, given her son’s medical history, that the wait for the ambulance would have been so long.

“They said the ambulances they had couldn’t drop off the people they were with and one wouldn’t be available for a few hours,” Mrs Benson adds.

“That, to me, is communicating that we don’t consider it an emergency.”

Benson said her son now faces an uncertain recovery.

Since your intestine was removed during surgery, you will now use a stoma to collect waste.

He said his life has changed, the rehabilitation and “possible complications such as infections.”

“All of these things that maybe, we don’t know, could have been avoided if an ambulance had arrived on time when I called.”

Mr Rooney’s case comes after reports of Long waits in emergency departments during the winter period.

An emergency consultant at Ulster Hospital said the situation there was “terrible” and they are currently significantly over capacity.

Dr Andrew Dobbin, clinical director of emergency medicine at the South Eastern Trust, told Good Morning Ulster there were 690 patients for the hospital’s 540 beds on Tuesday.

He said 100 of them were medically fit to leave hospital.

Of the 690, 80 were in corridor beds and another 70 were waiting for beds in the emergency department, which only has 51 cubicles.

“There is a significant mismatch between demand and capacity,” he said.

Dr. Dobbin also said low flu vaccine uptake this year was a factor.

He said there were “waiting rooms packed with vulnerable sick patients”.

He added that this risk is then transmitted to clinical staff who are also working.

“We had eight of the 16 doctors on the Monday afternoon shift sick with flu-like illnesses,” he said.

However, he added that problems with discharging patients from hospital along with the way social and community care is provided are also a big problem.

On Tuesday, the The Assembly health committee has met to discuss the pressures on Northern Ireland’s hospitals.