A foot fetishist who made more than a thousand calls to the NHS’s 111 medical emergency service to ask call handlers about their feet has been convicted and fined.
According to a report in The Independent, Richard Cove admitted making malicious communications at Worthing Magistrate’s Court after police had discovered he had repeatedly phoned the free health advice line to indulge his fetish. He was given a suspended 16-week prison sentence and ordered to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work and pay £2,000 compensation to the NHS.
The South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SECAmb), which runs the 111 phone line in the region, said Cove’s 1,263 phone calls over two years had cost the NHS almost £22,000. Cove was caught after a member of the public made a complaint in 2019 to NHS 111 reporting they were repeatedly contacted by the service despite having never phoned the number. SECAmb then discovered a nuisance caller had been regularly phoning NHS 111 but using a false name and faked ailments, some of which had led to NHS 111 clinicians making return calls or even sending out ambulances. In many of the calls, the caller would pretend to be an elderly woman and talk about “her” feet, before going on to ask the NHS 111 handler on the other end of the line about their feet.
David Davis, SECAmb’s head of integrated governance, said Cove’s calls had not only distressed his 111 staff, but also tied up their time when they could have been helping people with real medical problems.
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