The director of a private ambulance service has rejected claims that its response after a football fan suffered a fatal cardiac arrest during a Championship match was “chaotic” and a “shambles”.
Mark Townsend, 57, died after collapsing among West Bromwich Albion supporters at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough Stadium on 28 September 2024, an inquest heard.
GP Richard Stones, a West Brom fan, told Sheffield Coroners’ Court on Monday he was the first to give Mr Townsend CPR in the Leppings Lane stand.
He testified that the care received at the ground was a “shambles”.
However, Lewis Wright, the owner and director of Lambda Medical, which provides medical services for Sheffield Wednesday, told a coroner on Monday that it was “almost text-book in how it was run in a very hostile and difficult environment”.
Dr Stones earlier described how he and off-duty paramedic Chelsea Jones took turns to do chest compressions on Mr Townsend, telling the court: “We are doing CPR. We are screaming out to get some help and nothing came.”
He said he asked for a defibrillator, but “literally, the stewards were just looking at me”.
Dr Stones said that when paramedics arrived they had a defibrillator but no oxygen.
He said: “It was just a shambles.”
The GP told the inquest that a decision was made to move Mr Townsend to the concourse behind the Leppings Lane stand, where he said there was “more chaos”.
He said he was about to give intravenous drugs to Mr Townsend, because nobody else seemed to be doing it, when a steward asked him to “move away”.
Dr Stones said it was one of the worst pre-hospital critical care scenarios that he had witnessed, adding it was “just awful”.
He told Sheffield’s senior coroner Tanyka Rawden that he had been a West Brom supporter for 50 years and was a regular at home and away matches.
He said he was a GP with the Ministry of Defence, had experience of working in an A&E department and also as a football club doctor.
Dr Stones said the fans around him were chanting for the referee to stop the game and a couple of supporters went on to the pitch to try to halt the match.
He said: “They should have stopped the game.”
Asked whether the actions of the crowd around him did anything to contribute to the poor response he saw, Dr Stones said: “The Albion fans did nothing wrong that day.”
But Mr Wright told the inquest that, as well as running the firm, he was an advanced paramedic and the first member of his team to reach Mr Townsend.
He said Dr Stones’s description of what happened in the stand was so different from his version of events that “I can only surmise that he was at a different event from me”.
The coroner put it to him that the two medically-trained West Brom fans who intervened, Dr Stones and Ms Jones, had described a chaotic scene.
Mr Wright said: “There was a clear action plan throughout.
“There was clear communication. It was almost text-book in how it was run, in a very hostile and difficult environment.”
He said: “There was a clear plan and a clear leadership there.”
And he said: “I have honestly spent a year going through this and thinking about it.
“I still believe decisions made on that day were the correct decisions and would have led to the best possible outcome for Mark.”
Mr Wright said it was not right that his team’s defibrillator’s battery failed after two shocks to Mr Townsend.
He said he made the decision to use a more advanced machine from an ambulance once Mr Townsend had been moved to the concourse.
Mr Wright described how a Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) crew from outside the stadium also arrived, and their critical care paramedic was “overly assertive”, telling everyone he was taking charge despite the Lambda team already working on Mr Townsend.
He said there were then effectively “two teams working on the same arrest”.
Asked by the coroner if this was a concern, Mr Wright said it “made things more challenging” but it “definitely had no detriment to the patient”.
Mr Wright said his firm won the contract for medical services for the crowd at Hillsborough in 2024, beating a bid from YAS.
He said that YAS retained the contract for the players, but this meant their crew should not get involved with a crowd incident outside of major incidents.
Mr Wright said Lambda now has both contracts.
The inquest is expected to last two weeks.
