One in ten 'non-urgent' patients in Berkshire had to wait more than eight hours for an ambulance, new data shows.

South Central Ambulance Service responded to 90 per cent of its least-urgent calls in under eight hours, 17 minutes and 25 seconds - but the remaining ten per cent of calls saw response times greater than this figure. 

It is the greatest figure recorded for SCAS in this category since March 2018, when it took ambulance teams more than 10 hours and 36 minutes to respond one call out of every ten. 

This comes as ambulance services across the country were put on a ‘black alert’, which means the care system is under severe pressure. 

SCAS responded to 3,497 of the most urgent calls in June 2022, managing to meet their caller in an average time of nine minutes and 48 seconds. 

This was the slowest time SCAS had recorded in this category since March 2022, when the mean response time to the most urgent calls was ten minutes and 28 seconds. 

Most of the calls SCAS received in June 2022 were ‘C2’ calls, a midway point between the most urgent and least urgent enquiries. 

Ambulance operators spent a total of 18,737 hours responding to these 25,859 calls. 

They did so in an average time of 43 minutes and 28 seconds, again the slowest rate since March 2022 (53 minutes, 20 seconds). 

South Central Ambulance Service declared a critical incident earlier this week, warning there will be delays in responding to patients with ‘less urgent needs.’

READMORE: Scas declares 'critical incident' amid pressures

The organisation urged people to look elsewhere for treatment, by calling 111, local urgent care centres or by calling their GP or local pharmacist. 

However, this has now been downgraded. 

In a statement, the service said: “Earlier this morning (July 14) we moved from our ‘critical incident’ status to an internal ‘business continuity’ status. The pressure we have been facing has eased but not gone away and we are expecting the next few days to remain very challenging due to high levels of demand.

“We would like to pay tribute to our staff, volunteers and partners who have worked with great professionalism, dedication & care over a challenging few days and we ask for the public’s help by appropriately using our 999 service for life-threatening or serious emergencies only.”