THE ambulance service for East Lancashire has sunk to the bottom of a key national performance table, after reporting the busiest month in its history.

North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) responded to just 59 per cent of the most life-threatening incidents within eight minutes in December, which was the worst figure recorded among England’s 10 ambulance trusts. The target for ‘Red One’ calls is 75 per cent.

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The figure for Lancashire matched the regional performance, but timings in some rural areas such as Earby and Barnoldswick dropped as low as 11 per cent.

Bosses said there has been a huge spike in 999 calls this winter, and December was the busiest month in the trust’s history. They said extra staff are in the process of recruited for call centres and emergency crews, while there has been increasing use of volunteers, such as mountain rescue teams and St John’s Ambulance.

Hospitals across the region have also reached breaking point this winter, due to high numbers of patients seeking emergency care, and this has often left ambulance crews ‘queuing’ to hand patients over to staff, therefore reducing the number of vehicles out on the road.

Some have also criticised the 111 helpline, also run by NWAS, for referring too many calls to ambulance crews.

Derek Cartwright, director of operations, said: “We have done as much as we can to try to mitigate the challenges the call increases has presented us with and have introduced a number of initiatives to ensure as many as ambulances as possible are available to attend emergency cases.

“We are doing all we can to continue to provide a high-quality service but would be very grateful to the people of the North West if they would assist us by only calling in real emergencies and first of all consider the alternatives we have outlined here.

“I’d finally like to express my admiration and gratitude of NWAS staff, who work extremely hard under very challenging circumstances.”

The trust has been an average performer on the Red One target for much of the last year, but performance slipped dramatically in December, when the number of Red One calls rose to nearly 3,000, from about 2,300 in November, which was a far bigger increase than that seen by other trusts.

The December figures are the latest available that enable a national comparison, but figures provided by NWAS showed its performance on Red 1 calls improved to 71 per cent in January.