The Sunday Sun
By Adam Jupp
ENGLAND — A Sunday Sun probe today unveils the serious — and sometimes fatal — mistakes made by ambulance crews in the region.
Lost medication and patients thrown from emergency vehicles are just some of the incidents uncovered by our investigation.
And we can today reveal that a paramedic has left his job following an incident in which a 999 patient died.
The paramedic driver diverted an ambulance carrying a seriously ill passenger because his shift had ended.
The seriously ill patient, who has not been named, was being taken to Stockton’s North Tees Hospital when the driver diverted the vehicle to the town’s ambulance station because his shift had changed.
The patient deteriorated when the ambulance set off again with a new driver and died soon after arriving at the hospital.
We asked the North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) for details of all Serious Untoward Incidents (SUIs) it had recorded over the last two years and uncovered a log of 14 events dating back to February 2008, with the most recent taking place just weeks ago.
The dossier includes the posting of a patient’s skull X-ray on Facebook in February 2008 by paramedic Philip Harling, who was sacked by NEAS and had his accreditation removed by the Health Professional Council.
The image, which had the patient’s name blurred out, showed a skull with three nails embedded in it and the caption: “This image was taken within the last week. One of our crews attended .” Another item dated January 7, 2009, also relating to University Hospital North Tees, stated: “Failure to operate ambulance tail lift correctly resulted in patient being thrown from same.” That incident led to the mechanism on tail lifts being modified, to “prevent human error”.
And at a patient’s home in Gateshead, in June 2009, a crew were transporting a patient in a wheelchair when they fell down steps.
Under the heading “follow-up action taken” the log reads: “Investigation undertaken. Both staff members subjected to internal disciplinary processes. The trust met the costs of the repairs required to the property.”
It is also revealed a pedestrian was knocked down by an ambulance in Stockton in September 2009 — an incident still subject to a police investigation and internal disciplinary procedures. A month later, an incident was recorded in which a person being treated in the back of a vehicle en route to Wansbeck General Hospital, Northumberland, was potentially given the wrong dosage of a drug. A staff member has been “subjected to internal investigation processes”. In December last year, there was a delay in transporting a patient whose condition was deteriorating from their home in Hartlepool to hospital, while just last month in the same town, a tail lift failed to deploy, resulting in a second crew having to be sent out.
And on April 19, on the A1 at Belford, Northumberland, an emergency vehicle was in a collision with a car with two passengers. The matter is also subject to police investigation.
The NEAS said it did not want to comment further on the findings.
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