Leigh News
Slashed Tyldesley man praises ambulance crew
10:25am Thursday 2nd September 2010
AMBULANCE crews and NHS staff have been given the thumbs-up by a local man who was cut to the bone in a freak home accident.
Disabled 62 year-old Gin Pit villager Peter Molyneux has spoken up in defence of the North West Ambulance Service which has been criticised as being one of the slowest in the country for emergency response times.
He has nothing but praise for the swift treatment he received after a fall at his Meanley Road home left him covered in blood and with his ribs and lungs exposed when a dagger-like shard of glass pierced his side.
"I was turning off the television at the plug when my leg gave way and I fell, shattering a glass TV stand unit. The glass just exploded," explained the man who helped build the Channel Tunnel.
"Instead of shattering like a windscreen would, pieces of the glass shelf were held together by an adhesive film to give the unit a smoked glass appearance. One of the pieces sliced into my left hand side.
"There was blood everywhere so I went into the shower but couldn't stop the flow and when I realised I could see my ribs I decided to call for an ambulance.
"The paramedics were there in seven minutes and were absolutely brilliant – friendly, jovial but very professional. They told me the gash had exposed my lung and it was a good job I was carrying a bit of extra weight or it could have sliced through my lung and I would have been in big trouble!
"In my experience their service was amazing, staff at the Royal Bolton Hospital were brilliant and the aftercare at Tyldesley Clinic was superb."
Mr Molyneux said he had been in touch with the suppliers of the TV stand and been advised to send details to their head office.
"I'm not after compensation - I just want to point out that the way the glass shattered could have been fatal to a child."
A spokesman for Currys, who supplied the TV stand, said they would investigate the incident.
*New figures from the Department of Health revealed regional response to the most serious emergencies in a target time of eight minutes in 2009/10 was only 73 per cent.
And of the 12 ambulance trusts in England, only two were worse.
The national target for responding to life-threatening emergencies within eight minutes is 75 per cent.
Five ambulance trusts in England did not meet the target, including the North West at 73.04 per cent, South Central, East Midlands, West Midlands and Yorkshire.
Ray Carrick, north west regional organiser for GMB and the Ambulance Services Union, said: “I think the difficulty from our point of view is in the past there has maybe been an obsession with targets.
“The situation would become absurd if we are saying if you get to a patient in seven minutes 59 seconds and they die that is good, and if we get to them in eight minutes 1 second, and we save their life, that is bad.
"That is Alice in Wonderland stuff, that is the world turned upside down."