AMBULANCE bosses have accused NHS Direct of increasing their workload by referring too many calls to them.

They claim the organisation, which was set up to cut the number of 999 calls to the ambulance service, is not filtering out calls efficiently.

Hereford & Worcester Ambulance Service NHS Trust is now hoping the situation will be solved by a proposed NHS Direct satellite unit for Worcestershire.

"NHS Direct is a problem for us," said Steve McGuinness, director of operations for the Trust.

"The organisation was going to be a panacea to move calls away from the ambulance service, but it doesn't work for us and we take calls from them instead.

"There has been a very one-way flow of information to us, rather than from us."

NHS Direct was created in 1999, and was designed to be a referral service for patients who were not sure where they needed to be treated.

It is manned by trained nurses, who take a brief history from the patient and then advise them what they should do, whether this is go to A&E, call an ambulance, or go to their GP or pharmacist.

Hereford & Worcester Ambulance Service is concerned too many callers are being referred to them inappropriately rather than elsewhere.

Ambulance Trusts across the country are subject to strict Government guidelines for their overall response times.

Eighty per cent of crews responding to life-threatening emergency calls have to arrive within eight minutes.

During November, 80.8 per cent of crews met the deadlines, which makes the Trust the second highest performing in the country, but board members are determined to keep meeting the targets by controlling demand.

"All calls are answered by a health professional who uses a clinical triage computer system along with their vast knowledge and experience to establish which NHS service would be most appropriate to use," said a spokesman for NHS Direct.

"Only calls tagged as urgent 999 are transferred to the ambulance service where it has been established the caller needs urgent attention."