JEREMY HUNT should “clear out” the senior executives at a troubled ambulance service, a top trade unionist said yesterday.

South East Coast Ambulance Service (Secamb) has been accused of putting patients’ lives at risk by planning to deploy specialist care paramedics to deal with minor ailments.

Bosses at the trust, which serves Kent, Surrey, Sussex and north-east Hampshire, say their hands have been forced by “high demand” and poor response times.

Highly trained critical care paramedics (CCPs) are currently sent to respond to the most urgent 999 calls, handling incidents such as strokes, heart attacks and car crashes.

But a memo leaked to the Guardian newspaper shows the specialists will now be redeployed into the general workforce.

GMB southern region secretary Paul Maloney blasted: “The chief executives of that trust don’t know what day of the week it is, and they’re using and abusing staff.”

Unison rep Nigel Sweet told the Guardian that patients could be “threatened” by the changes if CCPs were “responding to a standard callout” at the time of a serious incident such as a cardiac arrest.

Secamb was put in special measures in September. The trust came under fire earlier this year over a now abandoned scheme to delay ambulances for 10 minutes while it assessed whether sending out a team was really necessary.

And after the trust transferred its non-emergency patient transport service to contractor Coperforma, in September ambulance drivers were left unpaid and facing bailiffs. The contract will be taken back in house in February.

Mr Maloney branded the case “a comedy of errors” and said nothing would change “until they clear out the senior executives and chair of the trust.”

A Secamb spokesman said the decision would be reviewed at the end of March.

“The trust executive recognises the valuable clinical contribution that CCPs make to our most seriously ill and injured patients as highlighted in the assessment,” he said.

“However, it also felt that, while demand remains high and our response-time performance for all calls poor, the current model of not sending CCPs to some categories of patient could not continue.”