What happened
On 22 September 2007 Alan McMillan, a paramedic with the Scottish Ambulance Service, was treating an elderly woman who had collapsed while waiting for a bus on South Street, Perth. A crowd gathered round her. When the crew asked the people round the woman to stand back, Philip Kenny, 54, of York Place, Perth, who had been drinking, grabbed McMillan by the arm and swore at him.
Kenny told the court he acted because he felt the paramedics were taking too long to get the woman off the ground. She made a full recovery.
The outcome
At Perth Sheriff Court Kenny admitted assaulting, obstructing and hindering a worker responding to an emergency. He was jailed for three months.
Sheriff Robert McCreadie told him: “What right or knowledge would he have to get himself involved in such a potentially dangerous situation. For all anyone knows it could have been a life and death situation.” He called the assault disgraceful and said a custodial sentence was needed to bring home its seriousness. Every member of the public, he said, has to keep back and let professionals do their duty.
The court also heard that Kenny was on bail at the time and had a long record, including breaches of the peace.
What went wrong
The record describes an ambulance crew, not a single responder, so this was not a paramedic working without a colleague. The isolation was in the scene: one patient on the ground, a crowd close enough to put a hand on the person treating her, and nothing in the sources recording police or a barrier between the crew and the people around them.
The hazard was not the patient. It was the audience. Asking the crowd to stand back was the crew’s first act of scene control, and it is the act that set the assault off.
What it teaches
Anyone working in public has to make space before they can make a patient safe, and making space means managing people who have no duty to cooperate. On a crew with a casualty on the floor, both sets of hands are committed to the patient, which leaves nobody free to hold the edge of the scene.
The request itself matters. A bare instruction from a stranger in uniform can read as an insult in front of a crowd. Giving the reason, and giving the person something to do, changes what they are being asked to give up.
Questions for the room
- On your last emergency scene, who asked the crowd to stand back, and what did they say?
- If both your hands are on a patient, who is watching the people behind you?
- What is your script for moving someone who does not want to move, and have you said it out loud before?
- When a bystander interferes, what do you record, and who reads it?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. One source was read in full: the archive file of local press reporting held in the vault. No HSE or inquest output appears in the pack, so this page describes the criminal case and nothing about the ambulance service’s procedures. The sources do not record how many staff attended, whether police were called, or what the employer did afterwards. The sentence is as reported and the record does not say whether it was appealed.
Our lone working training covers scene control for staff who work in public with no second pair of hands.
Sources
- Victims and Victors archive (local press, Perth) · Man jailed for paramedic assault · 2007
Reviewed 20 October 2026.