A LANDSCAPER who nearly bled to death after being crushed underneath a tractor near Chipping Norton has called on the Government to protect the NHS which saved his life.

Alastair McKnight, now 71, was driving the machine up a steep bank with a mower attached to the back when it tipped over and slid 30 metres back down with him trapped underneath.

His left arm was crushed and his hand almost destroyed, his lung collapsed, and his left leg was broken.

He lost 22 units of blood and surgeons had to amputate his leg above the knee and reconstruct his hand from parts of his amputated foot.

Seven years later, after reading an article in the Oxford Mail earlier this summer which asked people to comment on the NHS, Mr McKnight has praised the surgeons, paramedics and doctors who treated him.

The father-of-one, from Chipping Norton, said: “The staff in the air ambulance and at the John Radcliffe Hospital saved my life. They did a great job, there’s absolutely no doubt about it.

“I have only gratitude for them. A few years before they would have just taken my left hand off. The risk of infection was enormous, but they dealt with it.”

Mr McKnight had to have a prosthetic limb fitted to his leg and numerous operations.

Now he is able to lift a dumbbell with his left arm, and go to the Chipping Norton Rifle and Pistol Club to shoot an air rifle with his friends. He gets around with the help of a wheelchair and a mobility scooter.

He said: “It’s very easy to criticise it from the sidelines and it is true the bigger an organisation gets the more unwieldy it becomes. But we would all miss it if it wasn’t there.

“I had the best care you could get.”

He added: “The problem is the NHS was never designed to deal with the numbers of people it has to support now. They are moving towards making it a system of health insurance – there’s no doubt.”

Mr McKnight, who moved away from the area in the 1960s to study but returned to set up a pig farming business in the 1980s, described in detail the incident that so nearly cost him his life.

He said: “I drove over something with the right hand rear wheel of the tractor.

“This lifted the mower off the ground and it swung the tractor round so it rolled and threw me off and landed on top of me. I was in and out of consciousness.

“Luckily a friend of mine who was taking trips to and from the yard found me and called the air ambulance.

“I heard the helicopter land and heard the paramedics saying ‘keep breathing Ali’ because breathing was extremely hard. I wasn’t in pain but I was confused and in shock.

“There was no checking I had insurance or anything like that, they just assessed me and got on with it.”

Mr McKnight spent several days in intensive care before beginning his rehabilitation.

He said: “I had the most skilled nurses you could imagine.

“They had to do everything for me but they were amazing.”