EVERYONE knows the emergency services are under pressure, for a variety of reasons – lack of resources, underfunding, or insufficient personnel.

Add to this the Government’s obsession with targets, and it is a recipe for huge strain on those who work on the front line of these vital services.

Today we can reveal that critically-ill patients are waiting up to 40 minutes for an ambulance, because there are insufficient paramedics to cover meal breaks.

A North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) report reveals that, while it is meeting its target for getting a paramedic to emergency cases, they are often in rapid response vehicles which can’t ferry passengers on to hospitals.

This means that paramedics manning rapid response vehicles are being forced to tend to patients for 30 to 40 minutes before an ambulance becomes available to take them to hospital.

And that problem is being made worse by meal break arrangements, which involve paramedics going back to their station before beginning the break.

Critics claim that leaving a lone paramedic to deal with a serious emergency, and the practice of making ambulances wait when they arrived at hospital, was putting undue pressure on staff.

The work of front-line paramedics and ambulance staff is tough enough as it is, without this extra burden caused by lack of resources and false targets, and is bound to affect the service provided to patients. It is also a salutary reminder how something as routine-sounding as meal breaks can nevertheless have a profound knock-on effect for the rest of the ambulance service.

For this reason, it is vital that NWAS gets its house in order. Some reassurance is being offered to patients with the Trust’s statement that it is in the process of devising a “robust” meal break policy that is consistent across the region and will enable the Trust to deliver high levels of patient care.

For the sake of everyone on Merseyside, those new arrangements cannot come soon enough.