A woman spent nearly 19 hours waiting in casualty at the John Radcliffe Hospital after a suspected stroke.

Marie Turner looked on in shock as doctors and nurses battled to find beds for an overflowing number of patients.

The grandmother was finally admitted nearly a day after arriving at the accident and emergency department - and was then given a bed in a day room which had been transformed into a makeshift ward.

She has now written to the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust to complain about her experience. The 58-year-old said: "It was so chaotic in there. It was chocker.

"I have never seen anything like it in my life. How patients were meant to rest in conditions like that I just don't know."

Mrs Turner was taken to the Headington hospital on Sunday, November 21, when she lost feeling in her arm and leg.

An emergency doctor told her husband Peter to phone an ambulance immediately, after he called for help from the couple's home in Cumnor Road, Lower Wootton, near Abingdon. Mrs Turner, the Abingdon district registrar, said: "I started getting symptoms at 9pm, but I had been feeling rough all day. The ambulance arrived very promptly and I was at the emergency department by 10pm. "But then I was left on a trolley in a ward until I had seen the emergency doctor at 12.30am."

She was horrified by the numbers of patients, many elderly, who were piled up in the corridors.

She said: "I was just parked on my trolley by the entrance watching everything go by.

"There was nowhere else to go.

"There were a lot of elderly patients on trolleys in the evening and the cubicles were all full too.

"They were kept warm, but it was the lack of people around to attend to everyone which was the problem," said Mrs Turner, who added that doctors and nursing staff could not have been more kind or helpful.

"There was a number of other patients down the corridor and we were just lying there. "There were several people calling out trying to get attention. They were confused and getting very upset. People were getting distressed and angry. I found it quite unnerving."

Mrs Turner was eventually admitted, but spent the next five days in a bed in a makeshift ward. Trust spokesman Megan Turmezei blamed the current pressure on staff for the situation.

Story date: Tuesday 14 December

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