MORE paramedics will soon be on-call in Herefordshire and Worcestershire after health chiefs agreed to plough more money into the ambulance service.

West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust, which covers Worcestershire, has announced 130 emergency care practitioners will be trained as paramedics over the next 12 months.

Twelve of those will cover the two counties.

The news came after the trust agreed its budget with its commissioners, the Primary Care Trusts.

The cost of the investment in staff will be around £1.69 million.

Currently 57 per cent of the ambulance service's operational staff are paramedics - but once the 130 emergency medical technicians have completed their advanced training, that figure will have risen to 66 per cent.

Paramedics have extra skills including being able to pass a tube down through the throat to help a patient breath, administering clot busting drugs to minimise damage after a heart attack and giving controlled drugs such as morphine.

Dr Matthew Wyse, director of clinical performance said the training will have direct benefits for staff and patients and will allow the staff to better treat the 10 per cent of patients who have truly life threatening conditions.

He said: "By training so many staff we will ensure that we are able to put a paramedic on every rapid response vehicle, be it a car or a motorcycle.

"It will also mean that we are able to provide patients with a much wider range of care pathways which can only be good for their care and help reduce the number of attendances at A&E departments."

Chief executive Anthony Marsh, added: "No-one should be in any doubt about the skill of our emergency medical technicians.

"They provide a superb service day in and day out. They are highly qualified clinicians who operate under a series of national protocols that allow them to give a range of drugs including pain relief and other interventions such as airway management techniques.

"What becoming a paramedic does is to provide career progression for the staff and an even better service to patients. This is the driving force behind any changes we make in the trust."