FOI 25-122 Sexual Assaults reported in SAS
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 25-122 Sexual Assaults reported in SAS
- Request Date
- 12 Mar 2025
- Response Date
- 07 Apr 2025
- Information Requested
Dear Ambulance Trust, I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act, please can you provide the following:
1) In the last five calendar years (2020-2024), how many paramedics and ambulance staff have been sexually assaulted on duty?
Can this be broken down by years (2020,2021,2022,2023,2024) and by assault type (i.e. sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, sexual assault, verbal abuse of a sexual nature, exposure, rape)
1a) Of those, can you provide both, the number of assaults perpetrated by other staff members and the number perpetuated by a patient or other. For the last year alone (2023/2024) - can you provide a breakdown of where instances of abuse/assault took place as well as a brief incident description.
2a) Can you provide a breakdown of genders of both victims and alleged perpetrators. Can this be presented in PDF format?- Response
The Service has a range of measures in place to help protect staff and known or reported areas where staff have previously faced violence or threatening behaviour are taken into consideration and communicated to attending crews. Scottish Ambulance staff are trained in managing aggression and assessing risk, enabling them to better judge when they need to wait for support from the Police, or request additional service support.
Public authorities are not required to create information in order to answer a request. There’s a distinction between creating new information, and compiling information. Where a request can be answered by compiling information from readily-available resources held by the public authority, this is not the same as creating new information. However, if collation of the information would require skill and complex judgement, the information is not held. This information is not held in a way that allows us to report on the assault type, brief descriptions or genders involved without looking at each case and applying complex skill and judgment to summarise each case. It is for this reason we have applied section 17 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002 to this part of your request, as information not held.
Please see the attached data sheet detailing the number of sexual assaults perpetrated by a patient on a Scottish Ambulance Service member of staff.
The details for the total number of sexual assaults alleged to have been perpetrated by Scottish Ambulance Service staff members from 01/01/2020 – 31/12/2024 are below. The numbers are too small to report on by year. Any further breakdown of the information could result in the incidents becoming identifiable.
Staff being accused of sexual harassment – 7
Staff being accused of sexual assault - <5
Staff being accused of rape – 0Important Information to Consider – The figures provided above are where an accusation has been made and do not reflect if the accusation was upheld or dismissed following investigation.
For the given data, you will see that some of the figures are shown as, five or less than five, please note that this figure has been suppressed because the statistical value is less than five. The Scottish Ambulance service has a duty, under the Data Protection Act to avoid directly or indirectly revealing any personal details. It is therefore widely understood that provision of statistics on small numbers, five or less are statistically suppressed upon disclosure.
- Response Documents
