By Tamara Cohen
The Daily Mail
LONDON — A married paramedic switched off the tracker in his emergency car so he could meet his lover for secret trysts, a disciplinary hearing was told yesterday.
Simon Surplice, 46, also boasted to his mistress — an ambulance service duty manager — that he could ‘magic up’ life-threatening incidents and pretend to respond to them to help her meet government targets.
The hearing was told that he and his lover, referred to only as Miss X, traded explicit calls on their NHS phones.
In one, Miss X said to Surplice: ‘In my clothes, dreaming of walking down the catwalk, check me out.’
He replied: ‘What I want is for you to walk down the catwalk with nothing on. Some days I just wish I had you sat next to me. I love you.’
In another they discuss a sexual encounter on NHS property.
He told her: ‘I’m in a right naughty mood. Shame it’s not dark by 7, we can explore Tellytubby Hill again.
‘So long as I’m not pretending to be somewhere else there’s nothing in my contract to say I can’t be ******* by senior management.
And in another he said: ‘I want to get into bed and do lots of lovely naughty things to you. Peel off your underwear with my teeth.’
On May 2, 2009, the pair discussed a tryst at Miss X’s home to which Surplice is alleged to have travelled in his NHS Trust car.
To stop bosses tracking his location he allegedly tampered with his GPS device and told Miss X in a phone call ‘we’re anonymous now’.
Bosses later discovered his vehicle was outside her home for two and a half hours.
The panel also heard that Surplice routinely told Miss X he could log bogus ‘running calls’ to make her look better at work.
These are not 999 calls but incidents involving ambulances being flagged down by the public or helping patients at a sporting or charity event. Department of Health targets require paramedics to respond to at least 75 per cent of Category A calls — those deemed life-threatening — within eight minutes.
But running calls count towards this target too if they are life-threatening.
A routine probe at South Central Ambulance Service in Hampshire found six suspicious running calls made by Surplice and logged by Miss X in May 2009.
Three were made on May 1 while he was supposed to be volunteering at a charity event for disabled children in his own car with no emergency equipment. No patient reports were ever filled in.
In one call to Miss X, Surplice said: ‘We’ll find you some LTIs later (life threatening injuries) and bring your stats up to 90 per cent before the day is done. I love you, I love you.’
She thanked him in another call saying: ‘You’re good at generating rubbish jobs, aren’t you?’
He replied: ‘There’s no need to thank me, that’s what I’m here for. No point in having a system if you can’t cheat it.’
Three more running calls were made by Surplice two weeks later while he was off-duty at a wedding in Portsmouth.
He is also accused of making a false emergency call to charter an air ambulance to make a flypast for a colleague’s funeral at a church in Hampshire.
Surplice’s phone bill for May 2009, footed by the NHS, was £109 — compared with the Trust average of £12.94. The Health Professions Council, sitting in London, will today decide if he is guilty of misconduct and should be struck off.
Sarah Harris, representing the HPC, said: ‘Mr Surplice and Miss X were having an affair. She would have a real interest in meeting the 75 per cent and it’s clear Mr Surplice was trying to assist her in this.’ Surplice insisted all his calls were genuine and put the allegations down to ‘playful, tongue in cheek banter’.
After an internal disciplinary hearing last year he was demoted from his role as operational supervisor and is working as an ordinary paramedic. He denies altering statistics or making false calls, intentionally disabling a tracking system or making a personal visit using a Trust vehicle.
He admits making inappropriate phone calls on duty and apologised, saying his behaviour was ‘unforgivable’. The hearing continues.
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