A London paramedic left patients in the back of his ambulance while he went shopping in Marks and Spencer and visited a barbers to get his hair cut, a tribunal heard today.
Dominic Colella, who has since resigned from the London Ambulance Service, is facing two counts of misconduct with the Health and Care Professions Council.
At a hearing today, a panel was told how on March 9, 2013, Colella was responding to an emergency call about an 85-year-old man who had collapsed in the queue at a Marks and Spencer.
After the patient - who it later emerged was suffering from severe blood poisoning - had been moved to the ambulance, fellow paramedic Yvonne Purves described how her colleague went missing.
She said: "The wife was understandably anxious about what had happened to her husband and was wondering why we weren't leaving to go to hospital.
"He then came back with two full bags of shopping and loaded them in to the front of the ambulance and flippantly said 'do you want to go to hospital then?'.
"Obviously, I wanted to go to hospital some time ago.
"I waited 20 minutes for Colella while alone in the ambulance."
In the second incident, a colleague described shoppers' disbelief when Colella abandoned his less-qualified colleague to treat a 40-year-old patient for head injuries - after they had collapsed outside the hairdressers.
Paramedic Donna Blair, who had arrived at the scene first, said she was handing over care of the patient to Colella's colleague when she noticed a woman looking "gobsmacked".
"I looked to my left and saw Dominic sitting at the hairdresser's chair with a lady putting a cape around his neck."
The panel heard that he delayed the ambulance leaving for hospital by between five and ten minutes.
Mr Colella, who has been a paramedic with LAS since 1996, failed to turn up to the hearing, which continues tomorrow, because he was working, the panel heard.
Additional reporting by PA
