A former paramedic appeared before a watchdog yesterday, accused of failing to diagnose a woman’s broken ankle – leaving her in “excruciating” pain.
Andrew Cowx – who was honoured for his bravery in a rescue last year – faces two charges relating to a call-out at a nightclub, and to an accident where a man had come off a stolen moped.
Yesterday, the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) heard Mr Cowx was called to an Aberdeen club at about 3am on October 8, 2011 after a staff member was knocked to the ground.
The woman, known only as Patient A, claims she was in so much pain she was drifting in and out of consciousness when Mr Cowx, who was working alone in a rapid response unit, arrived.
However, she insisted that while the then-paramedic – who resigned from the Scottish Ambulance Service last February and is now a winchman on a Bond search and rescue helicopter – asked her if she could straighten her leg, she did not remember him carrying out any checks before he sent her home with instructions to take painkillers.
She told the panel she could remember a friend carrying her out to his car, adding: “The pain was excruciating, every time the car moved it felt like someone had a hammer and was breaking it again and again.”
At yesterday’s hearing in Aberdeen, Mr Cowx, of Cookney, Aberdeenshire, asked the woman: “Do you remember you didn’t want an ambulance and didn’t want to go to hospital?”
She replied: “I remember you telling me that it was a Friday night and I wouldn’t get seen.”
The student was later diagnosed with a spiral fracture to her ankle and had an operation to insert metal pins into her shin.
The panel also heard from the Scottish Ambulance Services’s area service manager John McCullough, who investigated both Patient A’s complaint and a subsequent one involving Patient B on November 27, 2011.
He accepted that Patient B, who was found lying several feet from the moped, had not told Mr Cowx he had been the rider – and that he had attempted to flee from police before falling to the ground complaining of pain in his back.
Mr McCullough also acknowledged that the paramedic had to act on the information available to him at the time.
But he said there was no “reasonable reason” for Mr Cowx failing to properly log Patient B’s vitals on the electronic patient form.