There is a “gap” in police policy about which questions need to be asked of emergency services colleagues to establish how urgent an incident is, a senior officer has admitted after concerns were raised in an inquest.
Paramedic John Sutherland told an inquest into the death of Frazer Irvine that there was a “huge delay” between him and colleague Tom Le Sauteur first requesting assistance – in response to what they described as aggression by Mr Irvine – and police arriving.
Mr Sutherland and Mr Le Sauteur were last year convicted of failing to provide reasonable care to Mr Irvine, who died in March 2022 after going into cardiac arrest following an overdose.
Mr Sutherland said that he believed that if the police had come as a Grade 1 response – the highest priority – when the call was first made, that “Mr Irvine was still in a condition where we could have helped him down the stairs to the ambulance and got him to hospital”.
The call – which was made to ambulance staff and relayed verbally to the police in their shared control room – was given a Grade 2 status. Grade 1 calls require a 10-minute response time and Grade 2 within 60 minutes.
Giving evidence on Thursday, Detective Chief Inspector Mark Hafey, who oversaw operations at the time, said that communication between police and ambulance staff in the joint control centre was mainly done “verbally” by turning around to have a conversation with colleagues.
The police did not have the ability to jump on to an ambulance radio, he said.
DCI Hafey said there was not any “specific policy” on how information was shared or what questions were asked, other than data-sharing policies.
Coroner Bridget Dolan said that it was the paramedics’ understanding that, if they ever asked for police assistance, it came as a Grade 1. DCI Hafey said was not the case.
DCI Hafey said police officers often supported ambulance colleagues on Grade 2 responses – but if a paramedic called to say they needed “immediate assistance” and were “at risk”, that would “absolutely” result in an immediate response with blue lights.
The inquest was read the transcript from the paramedics’ call describing Mr Irvine as “extremely intoxicated and aggressive”, and the subsequent police log which read “unknown male, 39, suspected overdose”.
Coroner Dolan commented that there was nothing to indicate the degree of risk to the paramedic or patients in the dispatch request. She asked DCI Hafey whether that was needed.
DCI Hafey responded that police took calls regarding aggression every day, and that there “clearly wasn’t enough information coming to us at that point” regarding the incident.
The senior officer cautioned that he did not know how busy officers were at the time, but said: “It would have been helpful if a further question had been asked.”
Coroner Dolan asked whether the question of whether there was a risk to life – or serious injury – to paramedics or patients was asked before dispatch, to which DCI Hafey responded that there was no policy but said: “I would like to think it is asked.”
The inquest heard there was a new draft policy regarding communication between the police and the ambulance service when a request for assistance is made, which stated that a request should be made in “plain language” and passed on at the “earliest opportunity”, with no mention of questions that needed to be asked.
“I agree there’s a gap in this policy and it should probably be reviewed,” DCI Hafey said in response to Coroner Dolan.
DCI Hafey said that – despite a gap in policy – the incident involving the paramedics and Mr Irvine was “always a Grade 2”.
“Moving a crew to a Grade 1 is always a big step,” he said.
Professor Charles Deakin, an expert on resuscitation who provided reports in the criminal trial against the paramedics, said that any delay in the arrival of the police “did not lead to the cause of Frazer’s death”.
He said that there was still time – during the duration of the bodyworn footage once the police arrived – for a number of things to have been done to prevent Mr Irvine dying.
“The ambulance had 12 minutes to manage his deterioration and that didn’t happen even though the police were there,” he said.