The daughter of a woman killed after it took an ambulance 50 minutes to reach her has said it is only a matter of time but somebody else dies in the same circumstances.
Maura Porter died after she was struck by a car in Carndonagh in December, 2013 while returning from her local church.
Her daughter Davina has told Donegal Daily she feels it is “only a matter of time” before somebody else perishes because of the lack of ambulance cover in Inishowen.
At present there is only one ambualnce which is based
Ms Porter was speaking following a number of recent reports of ambulances taking more than an hour to be scrambled to patients in Inishowen from outside of the peninsula.
In one case a family had to wait almost two hours for an ambulance to travel from Donegal Town to Malin to attend a man who had suffered a stroke.
The late Maura Porter
Last week another ambulance took an hour and twenty minutes to travel from Glenties to Carndonagh to care for an elderly lady.
Ms Porter, who recently sat through two full days of her mother’s inquest, said she didn’t believe anything had changed since her mother’s tragic death.
“It is obvious that things haven’t changed in relation to ambulance response times.
“The National Ambulance Service review into what happened on the night that mum waited for an ambulance concluded and I quote “the review team believes that when the recommendations are implemented, the chances of such an event reoccurring are exceedingly small.”
But Ms Porter said “The review team’s conclusions have proven to be wrong. Dynamic deployment is not working and it is really disastrous deployment.
“People continue to wait for ambulances stressed and in pain. It is only a matter of time before someone dies again as a result of not getting treatment in time,” she said.
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