A paramedic who stopped to do personal shopping while responding to an urgent call has been cleared of misconduct.
A fitness to practise hearing found the case against Victoria Arnott “not well founded” after being told that she visited a chemist as she was feeling unwell.
The three-member panel ruled the former Scottish Ambulance Service worker had stopped to pick up medication on July 4 last year because she wanted to continue to work and provide a service for patients in Fife.
Ms Arnott had been allocated a doctor’s urgent call to attend at the home of a depressed and suicidal woman in Lochgelly and take her to Queen Margaret Hospital in Dunfermline.
Questions were raised after a delay of seven minutes was noted by her colleagues in the ambulance control centre.
The Health and Care Professions Council’s conduct and competence committee heard that Ms Arnott told colleagues that, while en route from Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, she decided to stop at PC World on the Fife retail park to pick up something for her computer.
But in her evidence to the panel on Thursday, the paramedic said she had been too embarrassed to tell them about her health issues in case she became the subject of gossip.
She said she had been “pretty poorly” from the start of her 12-hour shift at about 7am and began feeling increasingly “frustrated and distracted”.
Ms Arnott, who joined the ambulance service in 1999, said she had stopped to pick up over-the-counter medication for women. She admitted she had not asked for permission to stop and said this was because she was “not thinking straight”.
The panel said they found her to be an “extremely credible, reliable and professional” witness.
Earlier in the hearing, Ms Arnott admitted stopping en route to the woman’s home to do personal shopping without seeking authorisation from the ambulance control centre, but denied misusing an ambulance for personal purposes.
The panel ruled that it had not been proven that the ambulance was misused because there was no clear Scottish Ambulance Service policy for employees on the issue of stops.
Panel chairwoman Sarah Baalham said: “It would be reasonable to conclude that, if the registrant had sought permission beforehand, the ambulance control centre would have allowed a brief diversion off route for personal reasons related to,for example, ill-health.
“We have determined that, on the balance of probabilities, her need to obtain some medication to enable her to continue work was in fact the true reason for her need to delay the ambulance.”
The panel heard that the call was at the second lowest level of priority for the ambulance service with a response window of four hours. It had initially been received by the control room at 11.41am and was not allocated to Ms Arnott’s crew until 3.35pm.
The patient had been allocated for transportation only and was not put at risk because there was “little or no need” for medical intervention by the ambulance crew, the panel was told.
“This matter was a departure from the standards to be expected from a paramedic but, in the panel’s judgment, it was not so serious to merit the description ‘misconduct’,” Ms Baalham said.
“She accepted with hindsight that she might have done things differently.”
Ms Arnott continues to work as a paramedicwith a new employer. She declined to comment on the panel’s decision.