An inquest is to be held of a Watchet woman who died in Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton, a week after lying in agony for eight hours on the floor of her home waiting for an ambulance and medical aid.

Lorraine Attree, 74, who suffered from COPD and was in poor health, tripped and fell in the living room of her home at Five Bells, Watchet, at 11.30pm on June 11 on her way to bed and was unable to move.

Her family called for an ambulance and rang 999 five times before aid finally arrived at 7.30am the following morning.

Mrs Attree was taken to hospital with a broken femur and hip and a suspected broken arm. After an operation on June 14, she was transferred to an intensive care unit and died a week later.

This week her daughter, Thea Milton, who lives next door to her parents and shared her mother’s care with her father, called for changes in the local ambulance system: “There’s something wrong with the priorities system which is absolutely shocking.

“What on Earth has happened to our ambulance service? This issue needed to be addressed. You can’t blame the ambulance crews – they were fantastic – but they were dealing with social distancing problems while my mum was lying in agony on the floor.”

Commenting on the case this week, local MP Ian Liddell-Grainger said it ‘set a new and shockingly-low standard for inadequacy and incompetence. There can be nowhere else in the country where people requiring treatment are left waiting hours - and in pain - for ambulances to arrive’.

“I shall be asking the ambulance service for a full explanation of the delay. I want to know why they could not get to her more rapidly and a complete account of how they prioritised all the situations they were dealing with at that time. This cannot simply be brushed aside as one of the consequences of being ‘busy’,” he said.

Mrs Milton told the Free Press: “I don’t want anyone else to go through what happened to my mum. My father couldn’t move her and she was screaming in pain. How many more must go through what my mum suffered before the local ambulance service is properly funded and prioritised?

“Since this happened, so many people have told us that they have had to wait up to seven hours for an ambulance in the past few weeks – and this in an area where so many people are elderly and in poor health.”

Mrs Attree and her husband Frank had been married 54 years and had rarely been apart. Mr Attree worked for West Somerset Council and Magna Housing Association until 2010 when he retired a year early to take care of his wife.

“It was a real love story. He has lost his soul-mate and the family are absolutely devastated without her,” Mrs Milton said.

“When my mother had needed an ambulance before it has always responded within 15 minutes. What went wrong this time? How can she have been left in agony for so long? The guilt will never leave us and the grief is overwhelming.”

Mrs Milton said she could not speak highly enough of the paramedics and hospital staff:“The paramedics were faultless. They apologised profusely and explained they were a crew down and the night shift had been bogged down with Friday night frivolities.

“My mother was in intensive care for a week where her care was exemplary.”

An inquest into Mrs Attree’s death has been opened and adjourned until September. An interim death certificate attributes the cause of death to ‘fall with long lie. Community acquired pneumonia’.

A South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation spokesman told the Free Press: “We would like to express our condolences to Mrs Attree’s family following her passing in June.

“We are fully engaged with the coronial investigation into her case and we intend to present our findings at the upcoming inquest.”

Mr Liddell-Grainger said: “For an elderly woman to be left lying injured and in pain for eight hours is appalling.

“I recognise the fact that ambulance crews can only attend so many incidents in the course of a shift but there seems to be some major structural failings in the service if a woman in a situation such as hers cannot be given priority.

“Last week I heard a spokesman for the South Western Ambulance service saying what a busy summer season it had been experiencing, as if to blithely excuse all the instances such as this.

“It is not good enough to blame the influx of summer visitors and not to address the fundamental lack of resources which clearly underlies incidents of this nature.

“There can be nowhere else in the country where people requiring treatment are left waiting hours – and in pain – for ambulances to arrive.”

Mr Liddell-Grainger added: “I have received evidence from ambulance personnel as to how stretched they now are and the vast areas they are supposed to cover, particularly at night.

“It is clear the South West is now being utterly failed by one of its key emergency services, a situation which is inevitably putting lives at risk.

“And the blandishments its officials offer by way of excuse whenever incidents like this are flagged up are a real indication of their refusal to accept they are at fault – and are running an unacceptably substandard service.”