At a time when our TV screens are filled with commercials giving advice to the public on how to recognize the symptoms of a stroke and emphasizing the need for swift action, Attwaters have won a six figure sum for a Braintree man died because the NHS failed three times to diagnose the very same symptoms.

Jeffrey Allen Wingrove (48) died in December 2006 after his frantic wife Isabelle three times described his symptoms, which were those of a stroke. But a paramedic and a GP twice failed to recognize them.

Mr Wingrove’s widow and son have been awarded a six figure sum in an out-of-court settlement for clinical negligence against the GP concerned and the East of England ambulance service NHS trust.

The GP cannot be named at the moment in view of possible future actions.

One Saturday morning Mr Wingrove developed a sudden and severe headache at home. He felt weak and dizzy and found it difficult to move his right side. He began sweating profusely and vomited.

After two hours during which his condition did not improve his wife called the family’s GP. She was put through to an out-of-hours service and described her husband’s symptoms. She was told a doctor would call her within two hours.

An hour later Mrs Wingrove received a call from a doctor, to whom she described the symptoms again. The doctor suggested she should take her husband to Broomfield hospital, but Mr Wingrove was in bed and incapable of moving.

She told Mrs Wingrove it was not the out-of-hours policy to make home visits to such patients. Mrs Wingrove was unhappy and distressed with the lack of response and called the out-of-hours service again. She spoke to a nurse who told her she should insist that the doctor make a home visit.

Once again the doctor refused to visit Mr Wingrove and instead wrote out a prescription, for vertigo, which she said would be faxed to the chemist at Tesco in Great Notley from where Mrs Wingrove could collect it.

There was still no improvement in Mr Wingrove’s condition by the evening and at that point his wife dialled 999. But when the ambulance arrived the paramedic told Mrs Wingrove that her husband didn’t need to go to hospital. Instead he prescribed paracetomol.

The Wingroves had a sleepless night, and the following afternoon Mr Wingrove fell out of bed. He wore a vacant expression and was incoherent, and he failed to recognize either his wife or son.

An ambulance was summoned and this time Mr Wingrove was taken to Broomfield hospital. A scan showed that he had an infarct in the left side of his brain, meaning that part of his brain had been severely damaged and he had suffered a stroke.

He was transferred to the neuro-surgical department at Queen’s hospital in Romford where he died the next day.

The legal case for Mrs Wingrove and her son has been managed by David Kerry, head of medical negligence at Harlow-based lawyers Attwaters.

This is a terrible case, he says. Three times Mrs Wingrove appealed to the NHS to attend her husband, yet tragically they let her down.

Mr Wingrove was showing all the symptoms of a stroke, whereas the current TV advertising campaign to alert the public insists that a doctor should be called if the sufferer only has one.

Yet the NHS itself actually failed to recognize any of them, and on three separate occasions. We can only imagine the trauma suffered by Mrs Wingrove, knowing her husband was probably gravely ill yet unable to get anyone to take her seriously.

So for two days she had to watch his agony and was advised to treat him with paracetomol and collect a prescription from Tesco because the GP didn’t want to make house calls.

As a result of these failures Mr Wingrove tragically died and his family has lost a much loved father and husband.

Its an outrageous travesty of professional care and the public have a right to wonder, when they see the warnings of strokes on TV, whether the NHS might do better spending that money on training its own staff.

The family intends making a complaint to the General Medical Council about the GP.