Elderly Tewin residents say they were left stranded by the ambulance service after being told it would take six hours to arrive to help them.

The couple, both in their eighties, called 999 after the disabled husband, who has a heart condition, fell in their driveway at around 1.27am on Thursday September 1.

His wife asked for an ambulance as he was unable to get up, only to be told it would take 60 minutes to arrive before this suddenly changed to six hours instead.

They waited 20 minutes and then called for help from friend Andy Nation. Andy showed up within 10 minutes, helped the man stand up and took him to bed.

Andy said he was unhappy to hear the emergency services would have taken six hours to arrive on the scene and took to Facebook to let locals know

The responses he received showed that it was not an isolated incident.

Andy said: “I helped him onto his feet and that was all he needed but for them to take six hours to send an ambulance to someone is just not acceptable. This is an ongoing problem in hospitals and yet they have done nothing to solve the problem.

“It is understandable that they might have staff shortages in A&E but why have other measures not been taken.

“There are two problems here. First, the emergency responder should have inquired about other emergency services, if all he needed was some help to get up.

“The other thing is, if this situation is a regular occurrence in the health service up and down the country, then they need to put other measures in place. It’s just basic logic.

"Why can’t they refer the call to the police or the fire service because most of them are medically trained? So, for someone that has fallen over, they can assess him and decide if they can help him, or he needs an ambulance.

“If the guy had been left for six hours, who knows what kind of condition he might have been in, with his medical history.”

An East of England Ambulance Service spokesperson said: “We were experiencing high demand at the time and our call handler advised that waits for category 3 calls were up to six hours.

“Just over 20 minutes later we received another call which said that the patient had been helped to his feet and our services were no longer required.

“This was before a clinician in our Emergency Clinical Advice and Triage team could review the call to see if alternative resources could be used.”