AMBULANCE crews have had to put on hold life-saving training courses because they are too busy responding to emergency calls.

Crews across Herefordshire and Worcestershire have had to skip a two-day programme which teaches vital new skills including basic and advanced life support, child protection, paediatrics and health and safety.

Anthony Marsh, chief executive of the West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust, says it is more important that staff respond to emergency calls than meet their training targets and there is not enough funding for the ambulance trust to do both at the same time.

“The service is so poorly funded we can’t do everything we’re required to do,” Mr Marsh told the trust board.

“The pressure my staff and managers are under to sustain a safe 999 service is significant. People are working 14 to 16 hours a day to try and turn this around. The primary care trust knows from its own work that our ambulance service is the worst-funded in England.”

As of October, the latest published figure, only 11 per cent of staff within Hereford and Worcester have completed their mandatory two-day training course which Tony Murrell, one of the trust’s non-executive directors, said was “abysmal”.

This figure is lower than in other areas within the West Midlands, including Birmingham and the Black Country, where exactly half have completed the course, and Coventry and Warwickshire, where 22 per cent have completed it.

In the trust overall, 34 per cent of West Midlands staff have completed the training.

More training is being planned between January and March next year to improve the position, health chiefs said.

Ambulance bosses have to meet key targets, including responding to 75 per cent of the most serious emergency calls within eight minutes, which could suffer if they do not have enough staff on the frontline.

Poor hospital turnaround times – the time it takes to hand over a patient to A&E before an ambulance is ready for its next job – as reported in your Worcester News on Saturday– were also blamed for wasting time for ambulance crews and putting further pressure on resources