Paramedics thought stroke patient was drunk, his partner says

A stroke patient’s partner “thought he was dead” after finding him not moving, hours after “a disagreement” with paramedics over whether he was ill.

London Ambulance Service paramedics thought Ion Chiperi, 22, was drunk and would be fine in the morning after coming to his aid in the early hours of 23 September, according to his partner Doina Prisacaru.

Mr Chiperi will “never be the same as before”, Ms Prisacaru, 22, told the BBC, after it was later found he had had a stroke.

The ambulance service said it takes concerns about its care “extremely seriously” and would contact Mr Chiperi’s family “to investigate this matter thoroughly”.

Ms Prisacaru, who is pregnant, said they had “a normal night” at their London home, before Mr Chiperi woke her saying he could not feel his legs.

After calling an ambulance, Ms Prisacaru, who has since moved to Sevenoaks, Kent, said the attending crew told her “everything is fine” and they “don’t have places to take him to the hospital anyway”.

“I was in shock,” she said. “How can he be fine if he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t move now, he is not able to do anything?”

She told the BBC that if she had not known he had not had a drink, she “would have assumed that he maybe was drunk”, but the paramedics “were in a disagreement with me, saying that he is drunk”.

Ms Prisacaru then returned to bed with Mr Chiperi after paramedics left, but she awoke later that day to find her partner “with eyes half opened and with foam at the mouth, with hands and feet cold”.

“I had a shock, and pregnant, it was a lot of stress,” she said.

According to Ms Prisacaru, she called another ambulance and Mr Chiperi was taken to Queen’s Hospital in Romford.

But in the emergency department medical staff were still “just treating him as a drunk person”, she claims.

Ms Prisacaru said eventually a doctor ordered some scans, the second of which revealed Mr Chiperi had a blood clot in his brain.

Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, said it was “sorry Ion wasn’t referred to our specialist team sooner”.

“He was given a head CT scan within 30 minutes of arriving at A&E due to a suspected head injury, which showed no abnormalities,” said trust chief executive Matthew Trainer.

“Various tests were then carried out to determine the cause of his condition, which resulted in him being referred to our stroke team and undergoing a mechanical thrombectomy on the same day.”

Mr Chiperi has woken up from his coma but can only communicate through blinking, according to Ms Prisacaru, who does not know if he will walk again.

She said hospital staff told her Mr Chiperi would be “walking, talking, speaking like a normal person” if the first ambulance had taken him to hospital.

“My last few months of my pregnancy were just living in a hospital, just everyday going to see him and worry everyday what’s going to happen, and what kind of a father my baby will have,” Ms Prisacaru said.