NHS in Shropshire special report: Painful wait for pensioner after accident
It took three hours from the initial 999 call to getting admitted to Royal Shrewsbury Hospital A&E for Vairyna Marshall - and it would have taken even longer if she had to go to Telford, she says.
The delay was mainly to do with the delicate nature of moving her after a car ran over her legs outside her home in Ludlow.
But, even so, a longer journey on top of that would have been hell, she said.
And the time it took to get the right medical help to the scene demonstrates how stretched services already are, said Mrs Marshall, 72, who lives on Whitefriars.
She said: "I had a car accident just outside where I live, a car ran over my legs. It took two hours to get me on board an ambulance and I was taken to Shrewsbury - goodness knows how long it would have taken altogether if I had to go to Telford."
She said police were first on the scene after the accident, which happened in August this year, but she had to wait for an ambulance as others in the area were tied up on other emergency calls which she understood were life-threatening so took precedence.
She said: "In the end an ambulance came from Birmingham but the driver found he didn't have enough knowledge to move me. He needed a doctor on the scene. The doctor arrived about 20 minutes after that, and then it took a long time to get me on board."
Once at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, she said, she spent three weeks there but she felt she could have been transferred closer to home sooner, though kept being told there weren't the resources.
"I wanted to be transferred to Ludlow, but they said there were no beds there and my case was too complicated," she said.
However, she said, she did get transferred when she insisted by refusing to eat and then spent three more weeks in Ludlow - but again felt she could have freed up her bed and gone home sooner if home-care resources were less stretched.
She said it a was a clear example of the need for better urgent care services based in Shropshire's more rural areas, to take the pressure off Shrewsbury and Telford and allow people to get treatment faster and closer to where they live.
She said just two weeks before her car accident she had waited 40 minutes for an ambulance from Shrewsbury when she fell and fractured her wrist.
"We don't have reliable ambulances close by - we had some in Craven Arms, but they closed the station," she said.
"And it was just a fracture for goodness sake, we should be able to look at that in Ludlow, but they took me all the way to Shrewsbury."
