What happened
Laney Holland, 47, a complex care midwife from Northampton working for University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, was driving through Coventry to see one of the vulnerable pregnant women she looked after. She was on Hillmorton Road when she slowed for a group of children and adults standing near a broken fire hydrant that had spilled water across the road.
A boy of about 12 or 13 threw an egg that hit her in the eye and dislodged a contact lens. She was then hit in the face by a bag of flour. She put the roof of her convertible Mercedes up, and the group kept throwing things at the car. The attack lasted about four minutes. Other vehicles were attacked as well.
She said: “I made it really clear I worked for the NHS, but they didn’t care.”
The outcome
No sentencing has been identified in the reporting reviewed. West Midlands Police said it was investigating. The trust said abuse of staff was “completely unacceptable” and that such incidents affect staff’s ability to deliver the best care for patients.
Holland said the experience would not stop her visiting patients: “I’m so passionate about my job. Some people said, ‘Don’t go to that area again,’ but my women deserve good care.”
What went wrong
The attack did not happen at a door, in a flat or on a visit. It happened in the gap between one patient and the next, on a road, in a car, in uniform.
A convertible with the roof down, driven by a woman in NHS identification, is visible from a long way off. No source describes a risk assessment for her route, a tracker or a check-in between appointments, and none says whether she was expected to travel alone. What the reporting describes is a group, including adults, that carried on throwing after she had closed the roof.
The four minutes are the finding. In a moving car on a road with water across it and a group in the road, the worker cannot simply accelerate out.
What it teaches
Travel is part of the shift. Route, timing and the ability to divert belong in the assessment for community staff, because the time between visits is unobserved and the worker is in a vehicle rather than in a building with a door.
The other lesson is what a crowd does. Adults stood by while a child threw an egg at a nurse’s face, and the group kept going after the first hit. Uniformed staff should not assume that being identifiable protects them. Holland said she made her job clear and it changed nothing.
Her own answer, that she would keep going back, is why this matters to employers. Staff absorb this risk rather than abandon patients, so routing around an area has to be the service’s decision, not the individual’s.
Our lone working training covers travel and route planning for staff who work between visits.
Questions for the room
- What identification do you carry or wear in the car, and what would you remove today?
- If a crowd turns on your vehicle, do you stop, reverse or drive on? Who has told you which?
- Who has your route before you leave, and who notices if you do not arrive?
- Holland would not stop visiting. If a member of your team said that, what would you change for them?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: probable. This rests on a single source, BBC News Northamptonshire, read in full and dated 28 July 2021, so the account is reliable but uncorroborated, and the vault record marks it probable for that reason. The details are as Holland described them, including the age of the boy and the length of the attack. No sentencing was identified, and the page makes no claim about one.
Sources
- BBC News, July 2021 · https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-58003441
Reviewed 20 October 2026.