A retired teacher said he waited 18 hours to be treated in hospital after a heart attack in Cornwall.

Glynn Evans, 76, from Lincolnshire, said he had indigestion-like pain in his chest while on holiday in Bodmin in 2022 and after he called 999 at 20:00 BST, he waited overnight for an ambulance.

When he arrived at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro there were about 24 ambulances in the queue ahead of him, and he was seen in hospital at around 14:00, about 18 hours after his wife first called 999.

A spokesperson for Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Integrated Care System said they were sorry there was not a “timely response” for Mr Evans and it was due to pressure across the “entire” health system.

Mr Evans said a doctor came to him in the ambulance to do a blood test.

He said: “He came back later and told me that it wasn’t good news – I’d had a heart attack.”

Mr Evans, who now lives with heart failure, said: “The doctor who treated me was furious that I had to wait so long.

“I’m not sure my heart failure would be quite as bad if it hadn’t taken so long to treat me.

“There’s nothing that anyone can do about my long wait now. But I don’t want anyone else to have to wait that long and miss out on the best available treatment.”

A spokesperson for Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Integrated Care System said: “Any occasion where the care we provide falls below the high standards our patients deserve and rightly expect is unacceptable.”

The spokesperson said response times had “recovered to a more stable position” since 2022 but “there is still more to do”.

Staff were working “tirelessly”, they said, to avoid delays in ambulances being able to handover the care of patients, which they called “the result of pressure not only on the main emergency department but across the entire health and care system”.

Providing more care in people’s homes and in communities could “free up” hospitals to more quickly admit the most acutely unwell or injured, they added.

Mr Evans said he supported the British Heart Foundation’s (BHF) new campaign to fix what it described as “the worst heart care crisis in living memory”.

Charity chief executive Dr Charmaine Griffiths said: “Glynn’s story makes it clear: We’re in the grip of the worst heart care crisis the country has ever faced.

“What happened to Glynn was unacceptable, and it wasn’t just a one-off.

“At the BHF, we get calls almost every day from people who have gone through stressful and often dangerous waits for heart tests, treatment, or even emergency care.”

It comes as the new health secretary Wes Streeting said he wanted to find out the “hard truths” about the NHS and ordered an independent investigation of its performance in England.

The latest waiting time figures for the NHS show the backlog for hospital care has gone up again, hitting 7.6 million.

Writing in the Sun newspaper, Mr Streeting said the investigation – led by NHS surgeon and independent peer Lord Ara Darzi – would help inform his forthcoming 10-year plan for the NHS.