Claims that patient care is suffering because of targets imposed on the ambulance service have prompted calls for a government review.

According to the NHS Confederation, targets can produce unintended consequences and may not be benefiting patients.

Targets stipulate that trusts must respond to 75 per cent of category A 999 calls - life-threatening emergencies such as strokes and heart attacks - within eight minutes.

But NHS Confederation policy director Nigel Edwards told BBC Radio 4’s The Report programme that the NHS must move away from “very narrow process type targets”.

He said: “The clinical basis for the eight-minute target is pretty secure, the difficulty is that the target starts from when you answer the phone, when there’s quite a lot of information to be captured at the start, but the basic principle that you should try to get ambulances to people with life-threatening conditions is I think the right one.”

But he added: “Any narrow target which focuses on one measure does have the potential for producing unintended consequences and maybe not benefiting patients.”

He was speaking shortly after reports that 4,000 ambulance service staff have been assaulted in England in the last three years.

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