Police increasingly having to take patients to hospital in emergencies 'due to ambulance cuts' However, there remains a wider point here for Government and the emergency services in terms of the risk in not addressing the resourcing issue and wider public safety concerns. We would welcome Government's view as to how they will help us to address the problem. The police group leader spoke after concerns were raised about ambulance services in the east of England. Chairman of Essex Police Federation Mark Smith said his officers have to take patients to hospital nearly every day. We are having to convey to hospital almost daily in Essex at the moment. We are not pointing the finger at paramedics and ambulance crews, they are going through cuts as the police are going through cuts. The paramedics and ambulance staff join to do a job and I feel they, like us, are not able to do the job in the best way they can to serve the public. One member told him about a case where a pregnant woman who had been assaulted was told she would have to wait four hours for an ambulance. She was taken to hospital in a police car which had to keep stopping so she could vomit because she was in pain. Mr Smith said: "We are trained to give basic life support, we are not paramedics. We can hold the fort until trained professionals turn up. If they're not turning up and we've got seriously injured people we're not going to let those people down. But police officers have their own job to do and while we are conveying people to hospital we cannot do that job, and if the vehicle is covered in blood then it will be off the road. I want to raise this now and tell people what's happening so it can be tackled before people have to die. A spokesman for the East of England Ambulance Service said: "Often it is not the case that ambulances were unavailable, simply that the information we were given indicated non-emergencies which are given longer waiting times than patients in life-threatening conditions under the national prioritisation system. While we have already revealed plans to improve our response times with a raft of measures, it is important to remember that patients get a response target according to thoroughly assessed clinical need with only around a fifth warranting the eight-minute target for life-threatening emergencies, the remainder being subject to a target of between 20 minutes to an hour. This is necessary, and similar to the process at A and E, in order to get help to patients who need us first. A plan where ambulance service staff would speak to police directly to make sure the patient has been accurately assessed is being discussed, he added.