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A bloodied and bruised 74-year-old woman lay in the cold and the rain in the middle of the street for two-and-a-half hours because a stretched ambulance service could not get to her.

Beverly Calvert, who has dementia, suffered a distressing ordeal after falling in the rain near her home in Grimsbury, Banbury, Oxfordshire, on Tuesday afternoon, bloodying her face, smashing out some teeth and bruising her back.

An Amazon delivery driver found her in the road and called South Central Ambulance Service.

After 45 minutes passed, a neighbour - a retired police officer - called the service again.

He phoned once again before Beverly's daughter, Jo Elstob, phoned as well two hours later.

By this point Jo's mum had begun turning blue and was crying out in pain and pleading "please get me up, I'm cold," said Jo.

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One of her carers, Tina Winnifrith, lay on the floor with her, to comfort Beverly, a grandmother and mum-of-three.

Speaking to Mirror Online in the evening after returning from hospital with her mum, Tesco worker Jo said: "It's been a traumatic day. She's lost a few teeth and is very badly bruised."

Mum-of-two Jo said her dad, John, was "shocked and distressed at seeing her on the floor."

She added: "The man on the phone just kept on apologising, saying 'I have nobody to send to you'."

Jo was repeatedly told by the call handler to not move her mum from her position on the floor. As no-one had seen her fall, they couldn't be sure whether she'd broken any bones.

But eventually Jo, along with Beverly's carer and her neighbours, were forced to put the elderly woman into a car and take her to Horton General Hospital in Banbury, Oxfordshire, as her condition detiorated.

"We didn't want to," said Jo. "But she was going blue. It was raining, she'd been lying in the road for two-and-a-half hours."

A spokesperson for South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust said they "have a finite amount of resources" available to them and were experiencing "an incredibly busy afternoon".

The spokesperson said: "We were incredibly busy that afternoon which resulted in a high demand on all our services and at one stage we had 150 situations ongoing across the Thames Valley, all requiring the assistance of our teams within our control rooms and frontline ambulance crews.

"We regret that the patient spent longer than we would like without our assistance and would like to wish the patient a speedy recovery.

"Sadly we have a finite number of resources available to us and we need to ensure that we get to those patients whose lives are at risk as our highest priority and when demand is high, as it was this afternoon, regrettably this means that sometimes we cannot get to other patients as quickly as we would like. "

Jo said the terrible situation was not the fault of the ambulance service or the hospital staff, who were "amazing" and "brilliant" with her mum.

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"It's not their fault at all," said Jo. "But she's an old lady. Two-and-a-half hours is just not right."

She added: "I think that it's a shame that they just haven't got enough money or staff. It's a shame for them.

"She's now home safe and sound, minus a few teeth and some bad bruises."

The ambulance service spokesperson confirmed they received the first call at 1.12pm, and this "was passed to our 999 service via a neighbouring 111 service", the spokesperson said.

They said: "Based on the information given by the caller our response was triaged as needing to be with the patient within two hours.

"We received a number of other calls from the scene where our teams were able to check on the condition of the patient and ensure that the patient’s condition had not worsened.

"At 3.06pm we received another call from the scene and following that call the nearest available resource was dispatched and we arrived on scene at 3.36pm.

"When we arrived at the location the patient was no longer there and our crew were advised that the patient had been taken to the local hospital, something that our crew followed up with the hospital before being stood down to attend their next patient."