THE county’s ambulance service is not providing an acceptable emergency service in large parts of Oxfordshire.

The South Central Ambulance Service has admitted there are inadequacies in the 999 service in a report submitted to Oxfordshire County Council. In its conclusion to the report, SCAS admitted that the service it was providing in rural parts of Oxfordshire was “below an acceptable level”.

The Government’s national target for getting to high-priority calls within eight minutes is 75 per cent.

SCAS’s ‘snapshot’ figure for January 2009 showed only 52 per cent of calls from top-priority patients in rural areas of the county were met within this time.

The report says: “We acknowledge that our performance in rural Oxfordshire remains below an acceptable level and much work has been undertaken to understand the complexity of these issues. Rural Oxfordshire represents 29 per cent of all activity in the county.”

It acknowledged that the standard of ambulance service that emergency cases could expect continued to vary widely. It said: “The greatest challenge for the coming year is working through methods to better equalise performance across the whole geography of Oxfordshire.”

The report, by division director John Nicholas, was submitted to the county council’s health scrutiny committee.

The committee’s chairman, Dr Peter Skolar yesterday met senior trust representatives to demand improvements. He said: “We are looking for extra ambulances, extra staff and more money. The problems is that outside Oxford’s ring road the service is not able to hit the eight-minute target as required. I cannot see how things can get better without a great deal of extra resources from the Oxfordshire Primary Care Trust, and ultimately from the strategic health authority.”

Last year Oxfordshire PCT expressed “a high level of concern” about the state of the ambulance provision in the county and commissioned a review of the service.

And last spring a scrutiny committee of West Oxfordshire District Council passed a vote of no confidence in the ambulance service after learning that in the district only 41.2 per cent of emergency call-outs were hitting the eight-minute target.

The SCAS report will reignite opposition to the South Central Service, created in 2006, which saw Oxfordshire’s ambulance service merged into a giant trust stretching to the Isle of Wight.

Dr Skolar said: “I really could not care less what is happening in Hampshire. The South Central area is just too big.”

Mr Nichols, divisional director for Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, said: “Ambulances are reaching patients faster than ever before and response times across Oxfordshire, including rural areas, are improving.

"Rural areas present a specific challenge to the service and we are working hard to improve response times across these locations.”