Dying patients experienced vital delays in being treated by paramedics because of the time it took ambulance crews to put on protective personal equipment, the Covid inquiry has been told.
An ambulance technician, Mark Tilley, came close to tears on Tuesday as he described how the experience still “played on his mind”.
Ambulance crews had been told they could not put on PPE before arriving at the scene and had to wait to put on plastic Tyvek suits and protective hoods or masks.
Tilley told the inquiry that the delays could cost crews vital minutes before they were able to start treatment. “We could have actually been at the patient’s side a minute, minute and a half quicker in those really most serious cases,” he said.
“Turning up at people’s houses where someone was unfortunately dead inside the front window or just on the pathway up to their property … I would have normally gone over and started bouncing up and down on their chest [to perform CPR], but we went and got our masks and suits on, and all of that – that plays on my mind all the time.”
Tilley, an ambulance technician at South East Coast ambulance service who was giving evidence as a representative of the GMB union, also described how the inadequate PPE made him consider making his own protective equipment.
Aprons were so poorly made and in such short supply, he said, that “we seriously considered using bin bags and literally cutting a hole in them, because that way they wouldn’t blow up in front of your face” when outside.
In addition to flimsy aprons, protective gloves were out of date, “really cheap and nasty”, and ripped and tore easily. Face masks were routinely stored in the fridge in the ambulance, Tilley said.
He told the inquiry: “That’s what we were being expected to use and trust our lives with, and obviously then going home to our loved ones, knowing that 24 hours, 36 hours later, we might have symptoms, because the PPE hadn’t been installed properly and wasn’t in date.
“Until we started sourcing the hoods, there was no way of actually being properly protected.
“I exposed [my family] to elements of risk that I could have avoided, and that’s something that I live with, but I would be going home from work and having to strip off in the hallway so that I didn’t go in in my uniform to try and protect them. That plays on my mind.”
Alice Hands, counsel to the inquiry, said research conducted for the inquiry had revealed similar stories, with other ambulance crews saying they were “forced not to intervene … and watch people die” while they put on equipment.
But Anthony Marsh, the national ambulance adviser to NHS England and former chair of the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives, told the inquiry that while he was aware of those concerns at the time and had raised the matter with senior colleagues, allowing ambulance crews to put on PPE while travelling to calls to reduce response times would “not have been safe”.
