A MAN whose mother died after waiting three hours to see a North Yorkshire emergency doctor wants an overhaul of the system to prevent a tragedy.

When he heard his mother was being sick, James Rossdale, 51, called North Yorkshire Emergency Doctors (NYED), based in Monkgate, York, to say his mother, June, a 79-year-old diabetic with one eye and one leg, was vomiting and could not inject her insulin.

At 9.30pm on June 15, he was told a doctor would be contacted and he received a call 20 minutes later to say a doctor would be sent.

Mr Rossdale, of Low Catton, called again at 10.30pm and was told a supervisor would call back. No call ever came. At 11.15pm, a doctor rang and finally arrived to check Mrs Rossdale over shortly after midnight - almost three hours before she died. Mr Rossdale said the doctor did everything he could. "He performed all the checks he should have done and my mother would have died anyway," he said.

"But what worries me is what if she could have been somebody they could have saved? What if it was a child who died because it took three hours for a doctor to reach them?"

When a call is made to NYED, a doctor decides under the triage system whether the case is an emergency to be seen within one hour, urgent to be seen within two hours, or routine, to be seen within six hours.

Mr Rossdale said he wanted to prevent "the young father who has a bad headache, or the middle-aged asthmatic having trouble breathing, or the mother scared of the strange rash on her child's neck" being treated as just a routine call.

"As it took about three hours and numerous telephone calls for a doctor to arrive at my mother's, I asked who decided that a vomiting, 79-year-old, insulin-dependent diabetic with one eye and one leg was a routine case," he said.

Iain Robertson, chief executive of NYED, said he had reviewed the paperwork in Mrs Rossdale's case and believed that the doctor concerned made the "correct clinical decision" to treat the case as routine.

An NYED spokeswoman said an internal investigation had been launched and urged Mr Rossdale to write to her if he had any complaint.

She said: "Although our response time was well within the Out of Hours Review standards, we want to make sure that if there any lessons to be learned for the future then we can adopt them.

"In addition, we would welcome the opportunity to meet with them to discuss this case in more details if they would like to do so."

Updated: 08:38 Monday, August 16, 2004