A little boy with suspected pneumonia was forced to sleep on a cold hospital floor for more than four hours because of a shortage of beds.
His desperate mum Sarah Williment covered her four-year-old son Jack in coats in a bid to keep him warm and comfortable.
And when he was eventually moved to a ward, the youngster endured another five hours on a trolley before a bed was found.
Now, after witnessing the crisis in the NHS at first hand, Sarah, 34, has vowed she will vote Labour for the first time in her life in Thursday’s General Election .
In an exclusive interview with the Mirror, Sarah, who had nothing but praise for the medical staff, said: “I am frustrated about the system and the lack of beds, which I am presuming is due to a lack of funding to the NHS to deliver the services that are required.”
Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s shadow health secretary, has called on the Prime Minister to apologise to Jack’s family.
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He said: “This is shameful. Boris Johnson should personally apologise to Jack and his family. A decade of Tory cuts has brought us to this crisis in our NHS.
“If the Tories win on Thursday, patients including children will suffer five more years of this. We need a Labour government to save our NHS.”
Mum-of-two Sarah took Jack to her GP on Tuesday last week after he fell ill.
The teaching mentor said: “Jack had been very unwell for six days. He was vomiting, had diarrhoea and a fever and was coughing.
“We had been to the GP once and they thought it was virus.”
But when Jack did not improve and was refusing to eat, Sarah returned to the surgery, where the doctor called an ambulance, fearing he had pneumonia.
Jack and his worried mum were ‘blue-lighted’ to Leeds General Infirmary, West Yorkshire, where she said he was seen “very quickly” and given a bed and oxygen in A&E.
But a few hours later she was told the bed was needed for another patient.
“A doctor rushed in said they needed Jack’s bed and literally within a minute all of his stuff was pulled out of the bed,” she said.
“The doctor unplugged his oxygen, picked him up and moved us into what I would describe as a cupboard.
“They call it a treatment room. It was room without a bed.
“His oxygen was connected to the wall but he did not have a bed and he was really unwell.
“He kept asking to lay down. He was without a bed for four-and-a-half hours.
“He needed to go to sleep and he needed to lay down. He started falling asleep and he ended up going to sleep on a pile of coats.
“There was no bed for him in A&E and there was no bed for him on the ward, so he just had to sleep on the floor.
“The room was full of medical supplies. Doctors and nurses were coming in constantly saying ‘sorry, can I just take this, can I just take that.”
Sarah, from Leeds, added: “I don’t have any issues with the doctors and the nurses, they were really lovely people and I want to make that clear.
“I was just feeling despair. He was so ill and I didn’t know why he was ill.
“I thought if he has got pneumonia, laying on a cold floor is not going to do him any good. He was so grey, he looked so ill.”
At 10pm Jack was taken to the hospital’s Children’s Assessment and Treatment Unit, where he was put on a trolley for five hours and had a series of tests.
She said her son was “confused and exhausted”.
“He just kept saying ‘I want to go to sleep’. He was laying on a plastic mattress with a sheet of paper pulled across him.”
She added: “The problem is they (the medics) were so busy and there weren’t enough beds. They just seemed stressed and under pressure.”
At 3am Jack finally got a bed on the ward and slept for a few hours, with his mum sat in a seat alongside him.
Later that morning it was confirmed he had flu and tonsillitis and he was allowed home at lunchtime, where he has slowly recovered.
Throughout the election campaign, the Mirror has highlighted the lack of funding from the Tory government which has left the NHS in crisis.
And Sarah, who also has a daughter, says she will be switching her support from Conservative to Labour at the ballot box on Thursday.
“This will the first time in my life where I will be voting Labour” she said.
“I would like to thank the doctors and the nurses and the health care assistants because they were really good, really helpful.
“But I’m angry at the lack of funding and the lack of beds because I think that is failing our children.”
(Image: PA Archive/PA Images)
Dr Yvette Oade, Chief Medical Officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust said: “Our hospitals are extremely busy at the moment and we are very sorry that Jack’s family had a long wait in our Emergency Department.
“Our Chief Executive Julian Hartley has spoken to Jack’s mum and offered a personal apology.
“We have seen a significant increase in the number of people visiting our Paediatric Emergency Department, and this week we saw the highest attendances we have seen since April 2016.
“Despite this, our staff are working tirelessly to provide the best possible care under these extreme pressures.
“Jack was quickly assessed upon arrival and seen in two different clinical treatment rooms in the Paediatric Emergency Department.
“Within four hours a decision was made to admit Jack to our Children’s Assessment and Treatment (CAT) Unit for further monitoring overnight.
“Unfortunately, the unit was also experiencing exceptionally high levels of demand which meant that Jack was required to wait in the clinical treatment room in the Paediatric Emergency Department until a bed became available.
“Jack was admitted to the CAT Unit later that evening and was discharged home the following morning after a medical review.
“We are extremely sorry that there were only chairs available in the treatment room, and no bed. This falls below our usual high standards, and for this we would like to sincerely apologise to Jack and his family.
“We are increasing the bed availability in our Children’s Hospital and our Children’s Assessment and Treatment Unit will be relocating to a larger area in the new year.
“We are continuing to develop the plans for our new Children’s Hospital in Leeds which will be built in 2025.”
