What happened
At about 3am on 11 February 2021 South Central Ambulance Service sent a crew to an address in Glenesha Gardens, Fareham, where Paul Searle, 59, was reported to be having breathing problems. The clinicians tried to help him. He became aggressive and verbally abusive, and the crew left the property and went back to their vehicle.
Shortly afterwards Searle came out with a meat cleaver, pulled the driver, Scott Bruce, out of the ambulance and threatened to cut his ear off. The reversing vehicle hit a parked car. The paramedic in the passenger seat, Emma Cooper, radioed for assistance, got out, and found Bruce grappling with Searle. She helped restrain him.
Bruce needed stitches and physiotherapy for a cut to his hand. Cooper had a lump on her head. Both later developed post-traumatic stress disorder.
The outcome
Searle was charged with causing grievous bodily harm with intent and with assault on an emergency worker. He pleaded guilty to assaulting an emergency worker and to threatening with a bladed article, and was found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm with intent at Portsmouth Crown Court on 23 November. At Swindon Crown Court on 27 January 2023 he was jailed for seven years.
Judge Cutler called it “an extremely frightening attack” and said the country values its paramedics, needs them to do their jobs, and that the law will do what it can to protect them.
What went wrong
The withdrawal was correct. The mistake was where it ended. Leaving a house is not the same as leaving the scene, and a parked ambulance outside the address is a stationary target with two people in it, one of them in the driving seat.
The sources record no dynamic risk assessment for the call, no rendezvous point, and no second crew being dispatched. Once Searle had been aggressive enough to drive trained clinicians out of his own home, the address was no longer a place to sit and wait.
What it teaches
Write the rule so it does not depend on a judgement made in the moment. If a patient has become aggressive enough that the crew leaves the property, the next step should be to drive well clear and report from there, not to sit outside and finish the paperwork.
Weapons in domestic addresses are ordinary objects. Searle’s cleaver was a kitchen implement, and the crew may well have walked past the kitchen on the way in. What would have changed the outcome is not spotting the cleaver but deciding earlier that the visit was over.
A breathless patient who turns aggressive within minutes has told you something. Night callouts to respiratory distress are a known flashpoint, and the crew has to act on the change while they are still able to.
Questions for the room
- Once a patient has driven you out of the house, what does your service say happens next?
- Where do you park, and does that choice assume the scene stays calm?
- What would have made this crew leave the street rather than just the house?
- When was the last dynamic risk assessment on one of your night calls written down, and by whom?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: probable. The case rests on a single source, Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary’s own release. The force’s account is reliable, but no second outlet has been read to corroborate it, and the vault marks the record accordingly. Treat the sequence here as the police account rather than as independently verified fact. The pack and the record agree on the sentence and the charges; the record is thinner on the attack itself.
Crews working alone on night callouts, and the managers who set their withdrawal rules, will find the abandon-the-scene decision covered in our lone working training.
Sources
- Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, January 2023 · https://www.hampshire.police.uk/news/hampshire/news/news/2023/january-2023/man-jailed-for-assaulting-ambulance-crew-whilst-armed-with-a-meat-cleaver/
Reviewed 20 October 2026.