NHS: Paramedic suspended after sending "sexual" messages to a patient

A paramedic has been suspended after tracking down a patient via social media - and then sending them "sexual" messages.

After treating a patient in June 2020, East Midlands Ambulance Service paramedic Dean Carey tracked them down on social media, the Health and Care Professions Tribunal Service found. From there, he started messaging them for roughly nine weeks.

This only ended, the panel heard, once the patient's partner discovered the messages and threatened to report Carey, who subsequently cut off contact with the patient. They spoke first to their counsellor about what had happened and then filed a formal complaint.

Carey, who started working for Ambulance Response Services Ltd in 2023, is reported to have "exchanged multiple messages, some of which were personal, and which included the registrant [Carey] sending to Service User A photographs of his naked upper body and his erect penis". Video calls were also held between the two, although they never met up in-person.

The report stated: "Carey accepted that he had breached several of the standards of conduct required by a registered paramedic. The Panel had no doubt that contacting a service user via social media using details obtained through their treatment of them as a paramedic is inappropriate behaviour in itself and without more.

"In this case, Carey went further by then misusing that information to send explicit images to the service user. The Panel decided that an objective and fully informed observer would consider that behaviour to be deplorable."

The patient, who gave a witness statement to the panel, said: "I regularly spoke to Dean over Messenger video call. Every time this happened, Dean was parked up in his ambulance at work; he would not video call me at home in case his partner heard.

"I knew he was at work when he video called me, as I could always see that he was sat in his ambulance or car and wearing his uniform. Dean would keep me on the video call whilst he was driving to the patient's address, then would hang up when he arrived. He would often call me back after the job, so sometimes we would have several video calls in one night."

The tribunal panel has ruled that Dean Carey, an NHS paramedic, is to be suspended for an additional six months - having been suspended for 19 months already.