AMBULANCE bosses have been warned the service must improve because crews are failing to get to the most serious 999 calls quickly enough.

Leaders at West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust have received two performance improvement notices from regional health chiefs because crews have failed to get to life-threatening category A calls within eight minutes. If they receive another two notices, funding could be cut by primary care trusts.

The 999 calls are the most serious emergencies like cardiac arrests, strokes and car accidents where time is crucial to the safety and survival of patients.Ambulance crews are supposed to get to 75 per cent of 999 calls within eight minutes of the call being made to meet a Government target.

Anthony Marsh, chief executive of the ambulance trust, said at a trust board meeting: “Despite being able to respond more quickly and arriving more quickly to patients than we did last year and, on some days, with considerably higher numbers of patients, because the overall increase in numbers is much greater, we are struggling to hit targets in a consistent way.” In Worcester and Hereford the service achieved the eight- minute target in 76.4 per cent of cases in September and narrowly missed it in October when the figure was 74.6 per cent.

But across the region, the trust has failed to hit the target, reaching 70.6 per cent of 999 calls within eight minutes in September and 70.7 per cent in October.

Ambulance bosses got an extra £11.8 million at the end of September, on top of their £165 million annual budget, from the 17 primary care trusts which fund the service, including NHS Worcestershire, to help them respond to 999 calls faster. The cash has helped fund between 40 and 50 additional ambulances to ease pressure on the service across the region.

Paul Bates, chief executive of NHS Worcestershire, which holds the purse strings for healthcare in the county, has now said ambulance chiefs have no excuse for missing the target.

In the performance notice Moira Dumma, chief executive of the specialised commissioning team for the West Midlands, says ambulance chiefs have breached their contract over failure to hit the category A and category B targets for 999 calls.

She said if things do not improve after at least four performance notices, a warning notice will be served which gives them the power to withdraw funding altogether.

Ambulance chiefs say in the Hereford and Worcester category A area, demand is 32.7 per cent higher for the year so far than it was at the same time last year, with calls increasing from 18,251 to 24,220. Across the region, calls have increased from 121,384 to 136,376.

The ambulance service’s finance director Keith Wood says demand in October was 6.4 per cent higher than the trust was contracted to provide. He said the trust was launching a campaign to reduce the ‘inappropriate use of ambulances’ by the public.