Essex chief: My support for police officer “paramedics”

THE Chief Constable of Essex Police has vowed to give his backing to officers acting as emergency ambulances – even if the Independent Police Complaints Commission investigates their actions.

Stephen Kavanagh said that “when officers act in good faith, they will always get my support” if they are forced to act as paramedics. Essex Police officers have said they are stepping in “on a daily basis” to take people to hospital when ambulances fail to arrive.

Media reports over the weekend stated some officers forced to ferry critically ill people to hospital because of a lack of ambulances have faced internal inquiries or Independent Police Complaints Commission investigations after their passengers died.

“I have made myself really clear on this,” said Mr Kavanagh. “The primary purpose of policing is to keep people safe. If you are standing at a roadside with somebody who has been stabbed, has had a heart attack, who has been in a serious accident and is deteriorating, and there is no ambulance available, humanity would demand that you get that person to hospital as quick as you can.

“When officers act in good faith, they will always get my support. That includes challenging the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s interpretation of that.”

Earlier this year, the East of England Ambulance Service said it was working to improve its response times. The service said incidents of police taking patients to hospital because of late or unavailable ambulances are not logged – though references were made on call logs if a call-out is cancelled.

A spokesman for the service, which covers Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk and plans to save £50m over five years, said: “We recognise the need for back-up time improvements and have already revealed plans to address this by putting in place a raft of measures including 140 new frontline staff, better rotas and liaising with hospitals to reduce handover times.”

Mr Kavanagh added: “What we have done in the [last month] is get the ambulance service in to account for why they are in the position they are in and to see how they are working to improve their position.

“They are recruiting. And they are changing their systems to improve their demand management but that is going to take months. So in the meantime I need to support my officers in doing the right thing.”

Mark Smith, chairman of Essex Police Federation, said “Police officers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. We are never going to leave someone on the floor, on the street to die. We are going to do the best we possibly can but something is going to go very, very wrong.

“Officers must have the support of their chief officers if something goes wrong. We are only trained in basic life support. When an officer makes a decision to convey a person to a hospital or not – and a person sadly dies – that officer should have full support from chief officers.”

Steve White, vice-chairman of the Police Federation, warned against the police being asked to plug the gaps where the other emergency services were feeling the strain. He said: “Police officers are already stretched beyond the limit and cannot and should not be expected to plug the gaps those cuts have left across other areas of the public sector.”