FAST WILLY: THE FAKE CALLS AMBULANCEMAN

A senior paramedic who faked emergency calls to help his control room lover meet her targets has been suspended for 12 months.

Simon Surplice, 46, called the control duty manager and asked her: ‘I wonder if your stats are going up as fast as my willy.’

In another call the married father of two said: ‘As long as I’m not pretending to be somewhere else there’s nothing in my contract that says I can get shagged by a member of senior management.’

He also told her: ‘I will do anything to help your statistics. I will do anything for you. I love you, I love you.

‘I want to get you in bed and do lovely things to you.’

Surplice, a spokesman for the South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust, drove his ambulance to see his lover at her home and disabled the tracking device.

The Health Professions Council heard Surplice’s lover was a control room manager who had to meet a daily target of attending 75 per cent of urgent calls within eight minutes.

Surplice made six fake running calls when he was at a wedding and on a fishing trip – but staff were alerted because of the lack of documentation.

The calls were recorded because they were on a mobile phone paid for by the ambulance service.

Surplice was a voluntary first aider at the angling event in Warnford, Hants, when he made fake calls including a patient suffering a head injury and a man having a fit.

His lover, who was referred to in the hearing as ‘Miss X’ told him on the mobile: ‘You are good at generating rubbish jobs.

‘We can generate a fisher injury and then generate a stand down as soon as [the ambulance crew] get on the scene.’

Later Surplice is heard to ask: ‘Are you going to hit the eight minutes? If not you can always put me down as in attendance if there’s not going to be any comeback and hit the eight minutes.’

One of the couple was also heard to say ‘There’s no point in having a system if you can’t cheat it’.

Surplice made the other fake calls when he was at a wedding reception at Portsmouth Naval Base.

He recorded incidents with two people who had drunk too much and an emergency with an asthmatic girl.

Investigator John Radburn (corr) who listened in on the couple’s calls said: ‘The first few seconds were often of business nature, but after that sometime it got a bit heated or a bit lovey-dovey.

‘We looked in detail at the bill for Mr Surplice’s personal mobile, which is supplied by the trust, and we looked at a bill of £109.43.

‘Typically average user costs during that same time for 225 users was £12.94.

He added: ‘Miss X and Mr Surplice were both horrified that their personal life had been pulled out of the system for us to listen to and were greatly embarrassed.’

The paramedic was found guilty of ‘gross misconduct’ at an internal disciplinary meeting but was not sacked.

He was demoted from his role as Operation Supervisor to paramedic.

Surplice claimed the calls were genuine and said he had only gone to see his lover on duty to ‘complete paperwork.’

The HPC panel found Surplice guilty of making up six incidents to help his lover to meet targets and disabling the ambulance tracker device to visit his lover.

He was also found to have visited the woman’s home while on duty for ‘personal reasons’ and not to complete paperwork, as he had claimed.

Surplice had accepted that he made inappropriate explicit telephone calls to his lover whilst on duty.

The paramedic was cleared of arranging a ‘very slow and moving’ air ambulance fly-past at a colleague’s funeral at St Peters Church in Bishop’s Waltham, Hants.

He was heard to say: ‘Just thinking, if Heli-Med is not doing anything around 2.30pm if there’s any possibility of doing a fly over the church?’

Surplice gives the name of the church before adding: ‘It would be nice if they could do a very slow flypast. It would be moving.’

HPC panel chairman Colin Allies said: ‘Whilst the registrant offered to facilitate the fly over, there was no direct participation.

‘The panel found this arrangement was made by other colleagues.’

The hearing was told the married paramedic had two children aged five and seven and was the sole earner in the family, which had already suffered financial hardship from his demotion.

Surplice was handed a year long suspension order to protect the public and ‘mark the seriousness of the misconduct’.

Mr Allies the panel had found Surplice committed serious failings and action had to be taken.

But he said: ‘It found that the registrant had demonstrated some insight into his conduct, has learned a lesson from it and it is unlikely to be repeated.’

Surplice will be required to attend a review hearing before being return to the HPC register, and was told he should provide evidence of reflective learning, and relevant work and professional development during his suspension