Medical staff took 30 times longer than normal to reach a heart attack victim because of a faulty alarm on a hospital monitor and by the time they reached his bedside it was too late to revive him, a fatal accident inquiry at Perth Sheriff Court was told yesterday.

Senior house officer Dr Suresh Soosay, 29, said it should have taken no more than a minute to get to Mr Alan Calder, 65, after he had the attack. But he said the patient had already been dead for at least half an hour when he got to the scene.

Mr Calder had been linked to a heart monitor which should have sounded an alarm, but it failed to work and the patient was already dead when a nurse discovered him 30 minutes later.

The inquiry was also told it was the second time in a month that the same type of heart monitor had failed in similar circumstances on Ward 7.

Consultant physician Dr Alan Connacher, 40, said Perth Royal Infirmary had trouble with the Komtron monitor the previous month.

He said as soon as he heard the circumstances of the death of Mr Calder he notified the procurator-fiscal.

''Part of the reason for alarm bells ringing was the previous event one month prior, when a patient on the same ward had a cardiac arrest and was successfully resuscitated.

''At that time, the said machine didn't alarm. I said it should be labelled, taken away and checked by the estates department.''

Nurse Richard Donald, who discovered the earlier incident, said he stuck an out of order sign on the monitor and stored it away.

However, no-one at the inquiry has been able to say what happened to the machine after it was left in a room by the ward.

Mr Donald said he did not think it had been taken away and admitted it was possibly the same faulty machine.

Dr Connacher said that since Mr Calder's death all of the heart monitors had been replaced and new procedures put in place for reporting faults.

He said he was unable to say whether staff would have been able to save Mr Calder if the alarm had sounded when it should have.

Dr Soosay told the inquiry that had the alarm sounded the nursing staff would have put out an arrest call which would have brought a special team within a few minutes.

''In Mr Calder's case,'' he said, ''we could have been there in less than a minute because we were on the same floor.''

He said Mr Calder had a heart condition which meant he was at high risk of having an attack.

''Not everybody who has this condition would die,'' he added.

Mr Calder, a butcher, had been a fitness fanatic who cycled more than 100 miles per week. He died on April 25 last year, just a day after he was admitted to Perth Royal Infirmary. The inquiry continues.