AMBULANCE chiefs have apologised for delays of up to five hours for emergency calls – but warned there is no quick fix.

The North East Ambulance Service has admitted there are staffing shortages across its patch, with vacancies for about 120 qualified paramedics.

NEAS assistant director of communications Mark Cotton is confident that the vacancies will be filled by September next year, and insisted that ambulance service performance is constantly being reviewed.

Mr Cotton faced a barrage of questions from frustrated residents during a heated public meeting in Haltwhistle on Tuesday.

It follows an incident three weeks ago, when an elderly man waited nearly five hours for assistance after collapsing at Haltwhistle’s working men’s club, due to a high volume of life-threatening calls at the time.

Several people at the meeting, at Haltwhistle Library, spoke of their own experiences, including one local woman who was told an ambulance was four hours away, despite suffering from a suspected stroke.

Fortunately, the woman said she was taken to hospital in the car of a paramedic from a voluntary support service.

Mr Cotton said: “We are genuinely sorry about the delays. We are absolutely not in this job to deliver that level of service.

“We have slipped below our level of service when we have patients waiting for that length of time.

“It is not right. It should not be happening, and we are as unhappy as you are.”

Mr Cotton explained how calls were prioritised from life-threatening ‘red one’ and ‘red two’ categories, to less serious ‘green’ cases.

But he admitted: “Primarily there is a huge shortage of paramedics across the country, so much so that the Government has lifted restrictions on those type of specialist workers coming into our country.

“They have gone as far as America and New Zealand looking for paramedics.

“We have 120 vacancies for paramedics.

“We have the funding, but we do not have the paramedics.

“We hope to get to full establishment by September next year. That might look like a long time away, but it is not a quick fix.

“We have 96 student paramedics who will hopefully be qualified in the next 18 months to two years.”

Dr David Shovlin, of the Northumberland Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) said: “This is not an issue of funding, it is an issue of resource.

“We are statutorily accountable for the ambulance service, and it’s in our interests to maximise its performance.

“It’s about how we make the most of a very limited resource, and there are several areas we are focusing on.”

Dr Shovlin said one area was enabling ambulance crews to keep patients at home when hospital treatment was not necessary, thus freeing up ambulances for other calls.

Other initiatives, such as the ‘hear and treat’ telephone advice service; and ‘see and treat’ at local hospitals, were also good ways of reducing the workload on ambulances.

But Dr Shovlin defended the current policy of transporting patients to the Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital at Cramlington.

He explained: “The urgent care centre at Hexham General Hospital is staffed 24 hours a day, but if you have an emergency clinical condition, you will not go to Hexham.

“In such a case, you are better off at a specialist centre. Clearly you are not going to have that in every town and village.”

The meeting was called by Haltwhistle Town Council, which has closely monitored ambulance response times in recent years.

Coun. Margaret Forrest called for a more coordinated response to ensure community paramedics were swiftly followed to incidents by ambulances.