The family of a man who died after they unsuccessfully tried to get an ambulance and a GP out-of-hours service to help him have welcomed the decision of the ambulance service to change its protocol as a result of their experience.
The change in protocol was also welcomed by Louth county coroner Ronan Maguire, who returned a verdict of misadventure which, he said, in part came about because the system in operation in Dundalk "failed".
He was speaking at the inquest into the death of Owen Burns (58) who lived beside his sister-in-law, Patricia Burns, at Annavackey, Hackballscross, Co Louth. On Sunday, April 17th last year she visited him at 9.30pm and found him in bed and sick. She said she rang the nearest hospital - the Louth County - in Dundalk and asked for an ambulance.
The hospital put her through to ambulance control and she was advised to call the doctor-on-call service. Despite ringing the number for the on-call doctor left on the answering machine of her brother's Dundalk-based GP, she got no response.
"Despite several calls to the doctor on call, the calls just rang out all the time," the court heard.
Mr Burns's family stayed with him until about 11.30pm and left when he was asleep. When Ms Burns checked him 90 minutes later, he was dead in his bed.
The inquest heard from Paddy Watters, an officer with the ambulance service, that at the time the protocol was if a request for an ambulance did not come in on the 999 line or was not from a doctor they were to ask the caller to contact a GP.
The court heard that when the former North Eastern Health Board established the North East Doc On Call (Nedoc) service, the GPs in Dundalk opted out.
Mr Watters said the ambulance service protocol was being changed and that if, after 15 minutes, someone was unsuccessful in getting through to a GP, they could ring the ambulance service back and it would respond.
The postmortem found Mr Burns died from central nervous system depression due to alcohol toxicity and from heart disease.
Mr Maguire said the verdict he was returning was one of misadventure which was in part "because the system failed him".