What happened
In April 2025 Ella Johnson, a London Ambulance Service paramedic two years into the job, and a female colleague were sent to a 999 call for a patient reported unconscious at a bus stop in Shepherd’s Bush, west London.
“We literally just arrived on scene, announced that we were here to help, but he just came back with verbal sexual abuse straight away,” Johnson told the BBC. As they tried to lift him into the ambulance he pushed out his hands, which she described as getting “quite ‘grabby'”, and the comments continued. She called the experience frightening.
The two called the police and officers arrested the man. Four days after a new offence came into force, Ahmed Sheiki Ahmed was charged under a Public Order Act 1986 provision that bans harassment motivated by a person’s sex.
The outcome
At Westminster Magistrates’ Court Ahmed pleaded guilty to using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress on account of a person’s sex, and admitted being drunk and disorderly. He was sentenced to twelve weeks in prison and ordered to pay £150 compensation.
The offence covers intentional harassment directed at someone because of their sex, and carries up to two years in prison. Detective Superintendent Dan Thompson of the Metropolitan Police said 22 people had been charged by the force in the first three months of the new law. Johnson has since started wearing a body-worn camera at work, which is voluntary for London Ambulance paramedics.
What went wrong
There is no system failure here of the kind that appears in most cases on this shelf. What the BBC reports is a working pattern: a crew of two, on a pavement, with one patient, until police arrive. Two people in uniform can be as isolated as one.
The exposure sits between arrival and the police turning up. A patient who is intoxicated and being lifted is also a patient whose hands are free, and the crew’s own task, getting him onto a stretcher, is what puts them within reach of him.
The employer’s part has not changed. The sentence shows the law now treats the words as criminal, body-worn cameras remain optional, and the record shows no change to crewing or to how quickly police are called.
What it teaches
Lone working is not only about being the only person there. An ambulance crew of two on a dark pavement is a lone unit, and the plan for the job has to include what happens when the patient turns on them before the police arrive.
Abuse short of assault is now a reportable offence, and reporting it in writing is the control. The same street, and the same behaviour, turns up on someone else’s screen a week later. The account written today is what tells the next crew what to expect.
Our lone working training covers dynamic risk assessment and reporting for staff who meet the public alone.
Questions for the room
- When a patient is verbally abusing you and starting to grab, what has to happen before you decide this stops now?
- If body-worn video became mandatory, what would change, and what would stay the same?
- You report harassment to the police today. What goes into your written account so the next crew recognise the address?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: probable. One source was read in full, a BBC News report of 17 July 2026, and the case rests on that single outlet. No court transcript or sentencing remarks were among the sources, and nothing here goes beyond what the BBC states. The paramedic is named because she gave her name in that interview; the offender is named because he was convicted. No sexual assault is alleged in the report, and none is described here.
Sources
- BBC News, July 2026 · https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz72y4e94z8o
Reviewed 20 October 2026.