The East of England Ambulance Service is taking up to 20 hours to reach some non-critical patients.
Report says, the NHS service has also not been responding to some lower category calls due to pressures,as the service has been at “Surge White” for the past month, the highest alert level.
Trust chief executive Tom Abell said: “We are currently experiencing some of the most significant and sustained pressures in recent years.”
According to newsmen, the identity and job titles of the sources have been verified.
An East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust spokesman confirmed that, it had a protocol called Emergency Operations Centre Standard Operating Procedure, ESOP, 48 where a temporary suspension of sending ambulances to category 3 and category 4 calls is brought in, but these decisions were made on a clinical basis.
One staff member described a service struggling with a high volume of calls and high staff sickness levels which had led to gaps in rotas.
The official sickness absence rate across the entire trust is currently almost 4%, but the source said it had reached 12% in some areas.
They said colleagues were “too exhausted” to take up an offer of £25 per hour in overtime payments to cover selected shifts.
An internal document offering the payment also included an undertaking to not go off sick for a fixed period.
Taiwo Akinola/BBC
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