A LEOMINSTER man was shocked when he found a parking ticket had been slapped on his car while he was getting emergency care for a suspected heart attack.

Graham Lewis, 49, was told to pull over as soon as possible by an NHS 111 call handler after developing pains under his arms while driving home to Leominster.

He stopped in Dishley Street car park, where he was told by 111 he could not drive any further and had to wait for an ambulance to arrive. Paramedics ran an ECG to check his heart before taking him to Hereford County Hospital.

“The ambulance came and got me in the back, they’d done the ECG and a few other tests and I was trying to phone the other half to say I had to go to hospital,” Mr Graham, a window engineer, said.

“She didn’t even know what was going on, but I couldn’t get her in the ambulance so I stepped outside and as I’m on the phone the ambulance lady turns around and said I’d got a ticket.

“Rightfully enough there was a ticket on my screen. The ambulance was parked across the corner of the vehicle, there’s no way they couldn’t see the ambulance.”

Mr Lewis had not had a heart attack, but he argued the parking warden should have checked the ambulance on August 31.

“I nearly passed out because I was that stressed in the ambulance and then my blood pressure went through the roof pure and simply because I’d seen a ticket on my car,” he said.

He added: “I’m just not impressed by the ticket people just going around slapping tickets on vehicles – it’s ridiculous.”

A spokesperson for Herefordshire Council, which owns the car park, said: “Our parking enforcement officers saw no indication that the driver of this vehicle was inside the nearby ambulance, which had no lights on and its doors closed. It would not be appropriate for an officer to knock on an ambulance door and potentially interrupt medical professionals.

“Cases such as these are the reason there is an appeals process in place, and we encourage anybody who has received a penalty charge notice as a result of a medical emergency to contact us through the appeals process.”