THE North West Ambulance Service is at its highest level of alert – and new figures show it is failing to meet many of its response targets.

Critical incidents have been declared by ambulance services across the country as extreme pressure and an unprecedented heatwave threaten to send emergency calls soaring this week.

The service covering Cumbria urged the public to only call 999 in an emergency as it boosted staffing levels in preparation for an influx of incidents.

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And the NHS has written to trusts urging hospitals to take immediate steps to reduce ambulance waiting times outside of A&E departments to less than 30 minutes as the weather intensifies.

But alarming new figures show NWAS is already missing NHS targets, with patients waiting too long for ambulances in June, when the service handled more than 85,000 incidents.

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That month, the most serious calls – where lives were in immediate danger – were responded to in an average of 8 mins 12 seconds, over the NHS target of seven minutes.

Outside of that most critical category, statistics are more stark, with those needing rapid help for serious problems like strokes or chest pain waiting nearly 40 minutes on average.

That’s more than twice the NHS target of 18 minutes, while nine out of ten such ‘category two’ calls were dealt with within 1 hr 27 minutes.

For a third category of callers – those with urgent problems requiring hospital treatment and transport – 90 per cent of calls were responded to within 7 hrs 20 mins, nearly four times longer than the two hours stipulated in NHS rules.

Intense pressure and ambulance delays across the country have been linked to lengthy waits outside hospitals, with paramedics struggling to hand patients over to A&E staff.

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A NWAS spokesman said it was working hard in challenging circumstances to ensure everyone who needs an ambulance gets one.

He said: “To be clear, if someone is calling for a life-threatening emergency, we will prioritise the call and send the next available resource.”

He said it was unfortunate that non-urgent calls may have to wait longer than the service would like but said it had increased the number of frontline ambulance crews and introduced more clinical staff in call centres in recent months.

The service’s decision to escalate to the highest level of alert in response to “extreme pressure” means it is maximising all available resources and increasing staffing in call centres and on the road.

Our analysis of ambulance service statistics found calls to NWAS have increased by thousands year on year since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Response times have also grown considerably since then – in June 2019-20, before the pandemic took hold, the average response time to the most life-threatening incidents was nearly a minute shorter than in June this year.

For serious, ‘category two’ incidents, the average wait is now around 14 minutes longer than it was then, and for category three, it is more than an hour and a half longer.

UNISON’s ambulance lead, Alan Lofthouse, said ambulance staff are facing unprecedented challenges, adding: “They know patients are being harmed by delays getting to calls while they queue outside hospitals.”

He warned more patients will suffer and more ambulance staff will leave the profession if Government ministers do not focus on improvements.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said £150 million in funding had been provided to ambulance services, with the number of ambulance and support staff increasing nationally by 40% since 2010.

He said the Government recognised the pressure services are under, adding: “The Minister of State will be engaging with ambulance trusts as soon as possible to hear their concerns and ensure we are working closely to support them.”