A “depressed” Plymouth paramedic who was caught injecting morphine in a toilet after stealing drugs from his own ambulance has been struck off. During a conduct hearing Charles Kingdom, pictured, aged 37, blamed the breakdown of his marriage after he helped himself to the addictive painkillers – and forged patient records to cover his tracks. [...]

Clinical commissioning groups have begun imposing fines on hospitals that are failing to meet A&E waiting time targets, in a sign of the growing willingness of GP commissioners to tackle underperforming acute trusts. Three CCGs in Worcestershire, who have been handed delegated powers from the PCT, have withheld a total of £1.2m in payments to [...]

An ambulance crew in Antrim has been forced to leave the scene of an emergency call-out after being threatened by two men with steel bars. It happened at Fountain Hill in the town in the early hours of Saturday. The crew were approaching a man who seemed to have collapsed when they noticed two men [...]

A snowman put up for auction on eBay to raise money for the East Anglian Air Ambulance (EAAA) has sold for £102. Peter Rawlings, 26, built Frostie at his home in Stowupland in Suffolk at the beginning of the week. The description on eBay warns the product “may come in liquid form”. via BBC News.

The first stand-alone children’s emergency department in the South East has opened at the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital in Brighton and Hove. The unit, which is part of Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, was officially opened on 31 January. Previously, children have been treated within the adult A&E at the Royal Sussex County [...]

Health bosses have revealed four out of five weekend admissions to a north hospital are the direct result of people drinking too much. And the shock figures were last night described as “alarming”. Dr Margaret Somerville, director of public health and health policy with NHS Highland, singled out Belford Hospital at Fort William. via Press [...]

A project which has seen paramedics and special constables teaming up to deal with drunken revellers on the streets of South Yorkshire on Friday and Saturday nights has been deemed a success. Two special constables and a trained paramedic have been based together in a paramedic car in the centres of Barnsley, Doncaster, Sheffield and [...]

A GP has been brought in to A&E in Worcester to treat patients with minor injuries who shouldn’t have gone there in the first place. The doctor, who started seeing patients last month, is part of a pilot scheme to ease pressure on the busy A&E department at Worcestershire Royal Hospital. He treated patients that [...]

A senior manager at Great Western Ambulance Service has left the organisation with a £121,000 pay-off. The unnamed individual’s post was no longer required and the trust decided to offer a severance payment. A spokesman for GWAS said the manager concerned had been on a variety of secondments for the past three years and during [...]

Items stolen from the YAS included vehicle satellite navigation systems, mobile phones, hand-held radios and uniforms. The most serious was the theft of a defibrillator, though this was later recovered by police. A spokesman for Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust (YAS) said all of the thefts have been reported to police. via This is Hull [...]