As his wife lay dying, Lord Winston, the pioneer of IVF, accused a 999 operator of wasting time by making him count her heartbeats.
The 81-year-old Labour peer described how the phone taker interrogated him for a long time before sending an ambulance.
Following the unexpected passing of Lady Winston, 72, at their home in December of last year, he requested that ministers raise standards.
The Labour peer discussed his trauma for the first time at a House of Lords discussion on the issue of fatalities brought on by ambulance service delays.
The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch issued a warning last month that people are seriously hurt as a result of having to wait for paramedics and then being trapped outside crowded A&E departments.
In some regions, callers to 999 must wait more than nine minutes for someone to pick up the phone, according to a Daily Mail study.
The BBC series Child Of Our Time star Lord Winston stated yesterday: “Some months ago, when my wife lay dying in my arms, I phoned the 999 service.”
The man who answered the phone bombarded me with inquiries and requested that I calculate her heart rate in beats per minute. With a cardiac arrest, you just have a brief amount of time, therefore that loss of time is crucial.
“I had to stop giving my wife a heart massage until the emergency services showed up, but of course they hadn’t been called yet.”
‘When eventually the man backed down, it was obvious that he had not been trained to ask the right questions.’
Lord Winston, who is Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College London, asked health minister Lord Kamall to confirm ‘that there is proper training for people who answer these calls at these critical times, when they are dealing with someone who may recognise that their close relative is dying and that the latter can hear what they are saying on the telephone’.
He added: ‘It is highly dangerous and that makes it very difficult. The last thing we hear as we die is usually the voice of someone who is with us.’
In response, Lord Kamall thanked him for sharing his ‘very personal story’ and admitted: ‘Clearly there are too many incidents of this kind.’
The Minister suggested: ‘The person was probably trained to ask particular questions to ascertain how serious or how urgent it was and sadly, clearly it was inappropriate. I will take that particular case back to the department to see if I can get some answers.’
Opening the debate, Lord Young of Norwood Green warned: ‘People are dying as we sit in this chamber, literally thousands of them, and why?
‘Because paramedics are waiting, would you believe it, by hospital trolleys in the hospital waiting for a bed.’
He added: ‘Yet, still we do not seem to treat this as a matter of urgency. It is a national disgrace and I want an assurance from the minister that real action is to be taken.’
Lord Young said that when the son of another peer, Baroness Uddin, had a stroke it took ‘maybe six hours’ for an ambulance to arrive and he ‘suffered as a result of that serious consequences’.
Responding, Lord Kamall pointed to an NHS action plan for urgent and emergency care, which included paramedics, the recruitment and retention of staff, and more space in A&E departments.
The minister added: ‘I understand that he thinks it is unsatisfactory, but we have been hit by the pandemic, we are trying to recover and there is a plan.’
Tory peer Lord Tugendhat told how when he was run over in Westminster last week, it was police who took him to hospital rather than an ambulance.
He said: ‘Last Wednesday I was knocked down in Great George Street by a bicycle and rendered unconscious, and although a paramedic arrived from St. Thomas’s by bicycle quite quickly, there was no ambulance.
‘I was very grateful to the police, therefore, for taking me into St. Thomas’s and depositing me at the A&E. I thought that was very helpful and I wonder whether the Minister thinks that might happen more often.’
Lord Kamall replied: ‘One of the interesting things that is being looked at as part of the overall review is how many of these cases can be actually treated at the scene without requiring the patient to be taken to hospital.’
Lord Kamall added: ‘It is good to see that he has recovered.’