Bleeding Hungarian patient dies after waiting an hour for an ambulance

A family in Budaörs, Hungary waited for almost an hour for an ambulance to come to their bleeding family member. By the time they arrived, the woman had lost so much blood that she died in the response unit. According to the ambulance service, they were not at fault.

According to the Budaörs family, the doctor on duty, who was trying to keep the woman alive, called the ambulance three times, RTL Híradó reports. The family filed a lawsuit against the National Ambulance Service (Országos Mentőszolgálat, OMSZ). The OMSZ responded to the lawyer’s request by saying that the doctor on duty had not properly indicated the extent of the problem.

The emergency was not treated properly

Kata Draxler lost her mother last November. One day, she noticed that her mother was bleeding heavily. She immediately called the medical emergency room on her street and they soon arrived at the house in Budaörs. “When the doctor on duty came out, he was confronted with the seriousness of my mother’s condition and he saw fit to call the emergency cervices immediately, obviously after he had stabilised my mother’s condition,” Kata recalls.

The ambulance did not come for long minutes. Meanwhile, the doctor on duty, Kata said, had treated her mother professionally. The ambulance was called again half an hour later, and then again about 10 minutes later. Meanwhile, Kata’s mother was losing more and more blood.

“The wait from the first call was over an hour, which cost my mother her life,” Kata said. They were able to get her into the ambulance, but she did not survive the trip to the hospital.

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Ambulance service: we are not at fault

The family has filed a lawsuit against the National Ambulance Service to prevent what happened to them from happening to anyone else. The OMSZ replied to the family’s lawyer that they were not at fault. “We received a bitter response and they want to put all the blame on those who were here and helped keep my mother alive,” Kata said.

According to the OMSZ, as they had not been properly informed of the patient’s condition by the doctor on duty who informed them, the ambulance dispatcher decided to wait for the ambulance unit to be released “with a reasonable delay”, RTL Híradó writes.

According to their response, the call was made at 1:06 PM and they arrived 52 minutes later. They do not believe there was an undue delay.

The OMSZ cannot guarantee rescue in Budapest

As we wrote earlier this month, the National Ambulance Service admitted that it cannot fully guarantee rescue in the Hungarian capital. According to the Association of Hungarian Ambulance Workers, there are not enough professionals. There are more and more emergency cases where it later turns out that the ambulance did not even set off. Until this pressing problem is solved, unfortunately, cases like this will most likely be frequent.