it took another four hours for an ambulance to arrive. by then, ken was unconscious. he was taken to gloucestershire royal hospital, where he died that afternoon from a bleed to the brain. he was on his own, and he knew he was on his own. and he must have felt abandoned, alone on his bedroom floor. that's the most troubling part of it for me. increasingly, ambulance crews were getting stuck outside hospitals because they couldn't hand over patients. and busy hospitals struggled to admit people because of delays with discharging them into social care. even at the height of summer, normally a relatively quiet time for the nhs, there was no relief.