Terminally ill teen left on hospital trolley in corridor for 14 hours
A terminally ill teenager was left on trolley in a Glasgow hospital corridor for 14 hours while waiting for treatment.
Mark McAvoy, 18, was taken to Queen Elizabeth University Hospital on Monday after he began vomiting and experiencing stomach pain.
The boy suffers from cerebral palsy -a chronic condition that impacts movement – and scoliosis, a curved spine.
But staff told Mark and his mum, Leanne, that there were no beds available, leaving him to run around in pain on a hospital bed.
Only a day later, Mark’s condition declined so severely that he had to undergo an eight-hour operation and was placed into an induced coma.
Leanne, 43, said if the hospital had the resources to treat her son, Mark wouldn’t be in a coma.
She said: ‘They left him on that trolley in a corridor for 14 hours and his heart rate was racing up and down. I told nurses he had been on end-of-life care for the last two years but no one seemed to take into account what was happening.
‘We sat and sat and sat, while I kept telling them Mark was getting worse. He was in so much pain at that point.
‘I began to panic because I could see we were starting to lose him. I was watching him deteriorate in front of my eyes.
‘I eventually ended up having to call get a nurse from the hospice we are supported by to come to the hospital and speak to the staff.’
Mark was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer last Wednesday after being seen by doctor and remains in the ICU.
‘But if he had been seen quicker he might not be in a coma now fighting for his life,’ his mum added.
Experts have long warned that the NHS is creaking at the seams. Last year, a record-breaking 518,000 people were left waiting in trolleys for 12 hours or more, according to an analysis by the Liberal Democrats.
These waits for A&E treatment, called ‘trolley waits’, rose by 25% compared to the previous year.
At least 14,000 deaths in 2023 were associated with lengthy trolley waits, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine found.
The number of NHS hospital beds in England has halved over the past 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1987/88 to 141,000 in 2019/20.
‘The Scottish Government needs to take action and put more funding into the NHS,’ Leanne said.
She added: ‘The hospitals don’t have the resources they need and the result is hat my son has been failed, big time.’
The NHS said: ‘As is the case throughout the country, all our services are under considerable pressure, and the arrival of winter has brought additional challenges.
‘While we cannot comment on individual patient cases due to confidentiality, we would like to apologise to Mark and his family for the distress caused by any delay in treatment.’
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