By ANDY DOLAN

Last updated at 00:04 15 March 2008

When Joan Boardman felt her chest tightening, her husband James took no chances and summoned an ambulance.

It was a decision the pensioners were to regret. The paramedic who answered the call tripped in their driveway and is planning to sue for damages.

In a letter to the couple, Stephen Canning's solicitors claim the incident left their client with a severely damaged ligament in his left ankle which has led to a loss of earnings.

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When Joan Boardman, 82, from Louth in Lincolnshire suffered what was thought to be an angina attack and her worried husband James made a frantic 999 call

The Boardmans yesterday said the threat was "morally wrong" and accused Mr Canning of bringing the ambulance service into disrepute.

The incident happened when Mrs Boardman, an 82-year-old great grandmother, who had had a heart attack two years previously, felt chest pains while at their bungalow in Louth, Lincolnshire.

Mr Boardman, 83, who served with the 5th Royal Enniskillen Dragoon Guards during World War II, dialled 999 and an ambulance arrived shortly afterwards.

The two medics began treating his wife in her living room, before one of them - Mr Canning - went back to the ambulance to fetch a stretcher.

He tripped over a step next to the sloping driveway as he returned to the property.

Both he and Mrs Boardman were taken to hospital and the pensioner was later given the all clear.

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The offending step, marked with a circle, over which the paramedic stumbled and hurt himself. He is now sueing the couple

But a letter outlining his personal injury claim which was sent a few months after the incident last March.

His solicitors, Wilkin Chapman, of Louth, claim the accident happened as a result of the Boardmans' security light cutting out.

Although no sum of money was mentioned, the letter stated: "The light was either faulty because of a lack of maintenance or had not been programmed correctly in that the light was not on for sufficient time to allow someone to walk along the driveway and reach the front door.

"Furthermore the drop from the level of the driveway to the adjoining pathway is itself dangerous."

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Mr Canning was not covered by the East Midlands Ambulance Service's liability insurance because he was not inside the ambulance at the time.

Mrs Boardman, a former nurse who is a grandmother of ten and great-grandmother of three, said the couple had contacted their own solicitors to fight the claim.

"I thought the letter was a joke at first but both myself and my husband fail to see how we could be at fault for his accident," she said.

"The security light may have switched itself off but the porch light was on, as were the street lights and the ambulance had been left open so there was the light from that."

Mr Boardman said the paramedic may have fallen because he was struggling to carry the "great big" stretcher on his own.

He said: "This is morally wrong. We are now reluctant to call the public services and this has brought into disrepute an organisation which I've got the greatest admiration for."

Mr Canning refused to comment on the case at his home in Louth.

East Midlands Ambulance Service said he was pursuing the matter in his own right but has received the backing of his union, Unison.

A Unison spokesman said: "When someone is injured doing their job, then somebody has to take responsibility for it."