If you’ve been involved in an accident or are extremely ill and need urgent medical attention you’d expect the medic attending to you to get there as fast as possible. Not in this case.
An ambulance driver has been told he could lose his job and his licence after he was clocked by a speed camera travelling at 112mph when rushing to attend to a patient in need.
Paul Bex, who received the letter from police informing him that he faces prosecution, was speeding under blue lights to attend to a home patient after a surgeon told him he needed a liver plant within three hours.
However this man’s race against time to save someone’s life appears to have gone unconsidered.
Despite an appeal by his employer, lifeline Media Transport Service, Mr Bex will have to appear at a court hearing to determine further prosecution.
“I was doing my job safely and as quickly as possible. Now I find out I could lose my licence,” said Mr Bex in a report with the Metro. “The conditions were dry, clear and safe. I have been trained the same way as the police are trained. The worst outcome is that I could lose my licence which means that I will not be able to work.”
A grey area in the written law for the ambulance service says that an ambulance cannot exceed the speed limit unless they are carrying a patient.
Don Williams, president of the British Ambulance Association, told the Metro, that this law was ‘nonsense’.
He said: “If a senior surgeon hands me an organ and says that the situation is critical, I owe a duty of care to the patient, the surgeon and the relatives of the person who donated the organ.”
