AN 8-YEAR-OLD boy was left waiting 53 minutes for an ambulance that was sent to a school that doesn’t exist in the wrong county.
Xylan Lennon fell in a school in Mornington, Co Louth, but the ambulance was dispatched to Collon, Co Meath.
The National Ambulance Service has written to Xylan’s mother apologising for the incident that happened last month.
Speaking to The Michael Reade Show on LMFM, Carol Lennon, Xylan’s mother, explained:
“He was in school and they assumed that he was playing and fell…His teacher described it as ‘like an epileptic fit’ but he doesn’t have epilepsy. We don’t know how he ended up unconscious.
“When his teacher picked him up, his eyes started rolling so he put him back on the ground and called for an ambulance straight away. That was at 12:19.
“At 12:52 the child was still lying in the yard and the teacher rang back to the ambulance service and was told that the ambulance was still on the way and this time they stayed on the phone for another 20 minutes before the ambulance arrived.
“The ambulance came and checked him over and brought him to the A&E.
The ambulance was in Collon, at a school that doesn’t exist. They said the dispatcher that booked the call hadn’t been long in the job and maybe their training wasn’t up to standard and they were going to retrain them.
“It took me less than two minutes after I received the letter to find that the school didn’t exist.
The central station now is in Tallaght so staff who are working in a unit in Tallaght aren’t going to have local knowledge of areas…it’s bizarre, the system is bizarre, it’s not working.
“The thing is I’m glad that it was me because my son is fine there’s no long term damage. There are other children that have potentially fatal conditions and if it were one of them they would be dead and it would be front page news.
Lennon said she has been invited to Tallaght to see how the control room works but added that she’s very angry that the system failed her son and she wants something to change:
I want something to change, I want the system to change. Let it not be a mistake, let it be a lesson.
“I’m so angry that the system failed my child.”
The National Ambulance Service had not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing.
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