An 86-year-old granddad died after he was hit by a car and was left lying in the road for four hours in the wet and cold before an ambulance finally arrived on the scene.

Retired George Ian Stevenson was hit close to his home in the village of Johnstown in Wrexham County Borough in North East Wales on Wednesday, 2nd March.

His grieving relatives have now claimed that the first call to the emergency services was made at 7.31pm, but the ambulance only arrived at 11.37pm.

While he was lying in the road in the rain, freezing cold and fog, two off-duty paramedics who had been driving past tended to the injured man.

However, they chose not to move him at the risk of causing him further injury, as they believed he may have suffered broken bones.

The Welsh Ambulance Service is reviewing the incident and has since said that all of its vehicles were busy at the time.

According to the victim’s granddaughter Ellie Williams, 32, George was conscious during the long wait, and although he was in pain, he seemed okay at the time.

However, after the ambulance finally showed up, he suffered a suspected cardiac arrest and died shortly afterwards at Maelor Hospital.

She said: “A hard-working man who has paid his taxes all his life and paid into the system has been let down when he’s needed them the most, and I just can’t quite comprehend what has happened to him.”

She has since started an online petition titled ‘Stop the wait on Ambulances, people are dying!!’, which, at the time of writing, was just 150 signatures short of its intended 5,000 target.

She wrote in the petition: “The wait on ambulances is becoming a matter of life or death and something drastically needs to change, it’s happening all too often in the North Wales area.

“Paramedics go to work to help the people most in need and they are being prevented from doing this as there are no ambulances available and even when getting patients to the hospitals they are queued up waiting outside as there is no beds for patients.

“We are in 2022, there are people dying due to the waiting times of ambulances & the lack of beds. We need to do something about this together.”

The ambulance that eventually showed up had come from the town of Dolgellau in the county of Gwynedd in North West Wales, which lies around 50 miles away by road.

George’s widow Sylvia Stevenson said: “What on earth is happening to our country, the NHS? It’s north Wales [that] seems to be the worst place.”

An inquest was opened at Ruthin County Hall on Monday, 7th March, but was adjourned until an unspecified later date.

The 40-year-old driver of the car that hit the pensioner was arrested and provisionally released pending the investigation.