MORE than a third of the most seriously ill patients in the North West waited more than eight minutes for an ambulance in what a union says is proof of the "disgraceful" underfunding of emergency services.

The latest statistics for the North West Ambulance Service show that 37 per cent of all 'red one' calls, which cover cardiac arrests and when a person stops breathing, were not reached within the official target.

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The government's target is for three-quarters of these life-threatening incidents to be responded to within eight minutes, but the figure for NWAS is 63 per cent in November 2016, a significant fall from 73 per cent the previous year.

GMB, the union for NHS workers, says the worsening situation is a symptom of chronic NHS underfunding by the government.

Paul McCarthy, regional secretary GMB North West, said: "These disgraceful figures clearly show Tory tactics of underfunding and privatising the NHS are putting lives in danger.

"GMB members put their heart and soul into the life-saving work they do for our health service.

"But the Conservatives are cutting their feet out from under them – and the result is dying patients are left with a desperately long wait for emergency care."

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An inspection of NWAS by the Care Quality Commission, found the trust "requires improvement" overall but it was judged to be "good" in caring, responsiveness and effectiveness.

The report concluded the rate of staff turnover in Cumbria, with paramedic vacancy rates of 16 per cent in some areas, is too high.

Mr McCarthy is calling on an independent inquiry into NWAS to see why many critically-ill patients are not getting an ambulance quickly enough.

He said: "Not every emergency call gets a qualified paramedic crew because there is a shortage of paramedics within North West Ambulance Service – and we question why this shortage has been allowed to grow to 16 per cent when the GMB have been saying to the NWAS directors for the past five years, that more staff both internally and externally need to be trained up."

North West Ambulance Service response in full

A North West Ambulance Service spokesperson said: "The trust has experienced significant delivery challenges in dealing with the general 999 demand over the December, festive and January period. The operating environment over recent weeks has been amongst the most difficult on record.

"Despite this, our staff have worked extremely hard to reach patients as quickly as possible and have continued to demonstrate the caring and compassionate qualities recognised by the CQC in their recent report.

"The challenge has been two fold, first the increase in 999 calls. Second the major ambulance delays experienced while handing over patients at the hospitals across the region.

"Year to date the trust has recorded 999 activity increases in excess of seven per cent (overall) against the previous year with a more than 10 per cent increase in high acuity patients. Operational performance has fallen below the required standard across the region with ambulance trusts around the country struggling to meet standards.

"The average handover time at hospital has increased with a 10 minute average increase, per case when compared with 2015/16.

"This however masks long delays in handovers many of which have been in excess of four hours with the real exceptions being nine hours plus. This delay adversely affects the trusts ability to provide a timely response to patients waiting in the community.

"The trust strives to reach all patients as quickly as possible but is aware of a number of delays to patients in the community and we absolutely agree that long waits for urgent cases are unacceptable and are extremely frustrating for our staff.

"We would like to assure the public that we are doing all we can with our NHS colleagues to overcome these challenges."