AN elderly woman was left lying in the road in freezing temperatures for nearly two hours after a crash with a car in Poole.

The 80-year-old was on her way to do her weekly shop with her husband when she collided with a car leaving a driveway in Cranbrook Road.

Dalton Arthur, from Hamworthy, was on his way to work with his boss, Paul Powell, when he found the lady lying in the road. He called 999.

"I jumped out of my car and put my jacket on her straight away," the 24-year-old told the Daily Echo.

"We were told that we were a high priority call and she was next in line for paramedics to come.

"I was sat with the lady for an hour and 40 minutes before the first set of paramedics arrived.

"She had a lot of pain in her knee and was so cold that she felt her body start to seize up. I held her by the hand and she was in so much pain that she was really squeezing hard.

"Once the ambulance did arrive, they couldn’t move her because she was in too much agony with her knee.

"They brought one blanket with them, but members of the public had already come out with eight or nine blankets for her."

Mr Powell, who owns a carpet business, added: "If it had been my nan lying in the road, I would have been really irate. It was bitterly cold, and that ordeal was almost as bad as the initial collision.

"The whole situation was quite alarming considering the length of time she waited for an ambulance."

A spokesman for South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust said: “Managing the demand on the ambulance service across the South West can be very challenging and we must prioritise our responses and our ambulance resources according to clinical need, so that our most poorly patients receive the most urgent response – such as those in cardiac arrest or having a stroke. Sometimes this means that less poorly patients do not get the response that we would wish.

"During the time of this incident we were called to 14 higher priority calls across Dorset, including children with breathing difficulties and unresponsive, cardiac arrests and strokes. Across our Dorset operational area, which includes Poole, we were dealing with a three per cent rise in calls compared to the same day in 2016.

"To help us manage this demand, we would ask people to only call 999 in an emergency and to use other more appropriate services for less urgent conditions."

Gary Palmer, regional organiser of trade union GMB, said members were concerned about these types of "unacceptable situations".

"The ambulance professionals who eventually arrived on scene, I'm sure, will have been both devastated that the response in getting to the patient took so long and that these incidents are potentially only going to become more and more commonplace."

He added resources were "stretched to breaking point", and the concerns and complaints of frontline ambulance crews were "not being taken seriously".

Just last month a Bournemouth inquest heard how ambulance delays contributed to the death of 20-year-old Kathryn Richmond from Broadstone.

Kathryn, who suffered a ruptured spleen, had to wait an hour-and-a-half for an ambulance and later suffered cardiac arrest.

A surgeon told the inquest she would probably have survived if treated earlier.

It comes after staff at South Western Ambulance published an open letter calling for the chief executive to resign last month.

GMB members said: "We are struggling to maintain a crumbling service deliberately being underfunded by the government and made worse when those over pressured resources and stressed staff are then badly managed locally."