A St John Ambulance volunteer committed sexual assaults while pretending to carry out medical “assessments”, a court heard.

John Franklin committed one assault while a first-aider at the Sittingbourne division of organisation and three others while a volunteer on an Urban Blue Bus in Maidstone providing medical help in the town centre on Saturday evenings, it was alleged.

Anthony Prosser, prosecuting, told Maidstone Crown Court the offences concerned serious sexual assaults in late 2011 and early 2012.

“It arises out of the defendant’s work as a first-aider,” he said. “In the course of that volunteering he has been sexually assaulting women. The defendant denies that.”

The 38-year-old father was an active member of St John Ambulance and also ran his own private ambulance company.

Mr Prosser said Franklin asked an 18-year-old student if she would let him conduct a medical assessment of her in the back of an ambulance.

Believing it was part of his training to become a paramedic, she took off all her clothes and allowed him to touch her breasts and carry out internal examinations.

At his request, she allowed him to do it a second time.

“While doing it, he called her a dirty girl,” the prosecutor told the jury of seven men and five women. “He told her not to tell anyone, including St John Ambulance.

“He asked if any of her friends would be willing to let him practise on them. He said they would have to take their bras off and the examination would be ‘hands on’."

The teenager told her boyfriend and her mother what happened and then the police.

As enquiries progressed, it emerged that there were concerns about Franklin’s behaviour with drunk or ill women using the charitable bus facility in Maidstone.

One woman went there with her boyfriend in December 2011 after suffering a panic attack. Franklin told her to strip to her knickers and then touched her breasts while carrying out an ECG, it was alleged.

In December last year a woman who complained of feeling dizzy was told by Franklin to take her top and bra off. He lifted up her left breast and placed ECG pads on her.

“She remembers although he seemed professional, when she was topless his hands were shaking almost like he had Parkinson’s Disease,” said the prosecutor.

Another volunteer described an incident when Franklin examined a semi-conscious drunk woman wearing a short skirt, who disclosed she had previously been raped.

Franklin asked if she wanted him to check. She gave a drunken reply and he then parted her legs, pulled her knickers to one side and examined her saying: “That’s fine.”

He said she was drunk and told her to go home. The woman could not be traced, the court was told.

Franklin, of Kent Avenue, Sittingbourne, denies two charges of assault by penetration and three of sexual assault.

The trial continues.