A grieving 83-year-old father has told how he drove his seriously ill daughter to hospital after being told that it would take hours for an ambulance to reach her.

Llanteg mum Charlotte Burston was taken ill on Christmas Day and was experiencing chest pains.

Her teenage daughter contacted the ambulance service twice, but when no help arrived rang her grandad who drove from Clunderwen to his daughter’s home. He arrived to find her lying on the sofa saying that she couldn’t breathe.

He rang 999 and was told that an ambulance would take between an hour and a half and two hours.

“We asked if it would be better if we brought her and they said yes,” Charlotte’s father, Mr Laye, told a recent pre inquest hearing.

Unfortunately, Charlotte did not survive and died at Morriston Hospital on New Year’s Eve.

He felt that, had there been a different response by the Ambulance Service there may have been a different outcome and Charlotte may have survived.

Pembrokeshire coroner, Mark Layton reassured Mr Laye that his concerns about the ambulance response times were relevant.

“One could argue that if we all have to bring our family to the hospital ourselves, it’s not worth having an ambulance service,” he said.

“[However], they have equipment that you or I won’t have in the back of our cars.”

Mrs Laye said that her husband had been unable to do anything on the journey other than drive as fast as he could to hospital.

He had later been told by hospital staff that he would not have been able to do anything else to help his daughter, unless he had had a defibrillator in the back of the car.

“We have doctors and ambulances and paramedics to do that,” Mr Layton told him.

Mr Layton said that the next step was to contact the Welsh Ambulance Service Trust which would provide transcripts of the 999 calls.

“We will know how they have graded the urgency of the call and we will also know if that was correctly graded or incorrectly graded,” he explained.

He added that it may be necessary to obtain medical evidence to say whether immediate attendance could have saved Charlotte’s life.

“I hope some good will come from this with the ambulance service,” said Mr Laye. “I am 83. I remember when there was ambulance services all over for emergencies.”

Mr Layton adjourned the hearing, saying that there would be another pre inquest review in around six weeks.