A patient hit an ambulance driver over the head with his walking stick in a row outside his home in Brighton.
Barry Crampton, 53, of Tyson Place, Grosvenor Street, was due to be taken to the Queen Victoria Hospital, in East Grinstead, for an outpatient appointment in January 2019.
Volunteer patient transport service driver Gwyn Davies helped Crampton from his flat to the waiting car.
But Crampton was unhappy that he was being asked to travel in a car rather than a more conventional ambulance and took the keys from Mr Davies’s ignition.
In the row that followed, Crampton dropped the keys and, as Mr Davies went back to the car, Crampton hit him over the head with a walking stick.
The blow caused a laceration to Mr Davies’s head and he needed stitches.
Crampton was arrested and charged with assaulting an emergency worker.
Chichester Crown Court was told that Mr Davies had been a volunteer driver for 22 years for the South Central Ambulance Service, which runs the patient transport service locally.
The judge Rachel Drake, known as Miss Recorder Drake, sentenced Crampton to carry out 120 hours of unpaid work as part of a two-year community order.
She also ordered him to pay Mr Davies £150 compensation.
Crampton should have been left in the street, having to sort out his own way of getting to the hospital. Ambulance drivers and paramedics who get assaulted by patients, no matter how serious their injuries, should not be obliged to deal with them. In this case the driver was a volunteer, who will probably be not too eager to carry out with the work in the future.
Wow, what an absolute £^$$@*
Wonder what sort of unpaid work he will do? Hammering fence posts?
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. And poor Mr Davies needing stitches.