A 95-year-old woman was left waiting in an ambulance for 10 hours before being admitted to hospital, where she then waited a further 14 hours for a bed.
Jean Playford, who lives in a home in Downham Market, was rushed to hospital suffering from an infection on Tuesday, August 1.
Paramedics attended Oakes Court at 8pm and Mrs Playford was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King's Lynn an hour later.
Mrs Playford's son Kelvin Allen said: "The ambulance and my mother sat outside the A&E department for 10 hours until a free space was available at 7am the following day, taking up the full shift of two ambulance paramedics."
Mr Allen - who has written to his MP, Liz Truss, the frontrunner to be the next prime minister, to describe his mother's ordeal - added: "She remained in A&E for a further 14 hours until a bed became available at 9pm when she was finally admitted into the acute medical unit."
Denise Smith, chief operating officer at the hospital, said: "We continue to experience high levels of demand for urgent and emergency care services across Norfolk and Waveney and I would like to apologise for the delays some of our patients have experienced.
"We do have plans in place to expand our emergency department, this will increase the space we have available to take handover of patients from the ambulance service, work on this starts this autumn.”
Mrs Playford was discharged from hospital on Thursday, August 3 with a course of antibiotics and is now recovering well at home.
LETTER TO LIZ
Retired telecoms executive Mr Allen, 63, from Downham Market, has written to his MP and prime ministerial hopeful Liz Truss to complain about the state of the NHS.
"As a constituent living in Downham Market, I feel I need to expose to you the real life experience of health care that my mother received this week," he says.
"Clearly something is broken with our health system. My brother attended the QEH on August 3 to find 12 ambulances all waiting with patients awaiting admission.
"It’s been well reported that this is now common practice not just in King’s Lynn, but all over the country.
"The hospital staff told us that they can’t discharge patients quickly enough into the community to allow more patients to enter the health system.
"As our MP, how can you honestly state that this is fit for purpose in the 21st century and clearly something needs to change.
"The demands on such services with a rising ageing population retiring into West Norfolk, this can only get worse. There needs to be a radical shake up of the whole system.
"Your government proposals have been to increase overall health spending by raising the National Insurance levy, to provide more support into NHS and social care.
"Yet you are standing for prime minister with a plan to now cancel this additional health investment and as far as I can tell no other proposal by yourself has been made to get us out of this medical crisis, before any further onset of winter."
So far, Mr Allen has received a holding e-mail in reply from Ms Truss's office.
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