WHITEFIELD-based Greater Manchester Ambulance Service (GMAS) has sought to put the record straight following a report criticising its response times.

Health Which? magazine reported ambulances were not hitting Government targets which required the majority of major emergency calls to be met within eight minutes.

GMAS "emphasised" in a statement that the magazine had used last year's figures in its report and in the past year significant changes have been made within the service, including additional funding.

John Williams director of human resources said: "We are recruiting and training 101 staff in this current financial year. This represents almost 50 extra staff who will be available for full duty from April. "Secondly, for the first time in two years, we have introduced new vehicles to the fleet, 23 in total, and these will be despatched throughout the region during this month and next.

"Thirdly, we are introducing an intermediate tier of staff who will deal specifically with admissions to hospital and urgent, but not emergency cases. Qualified staff paired with less qualified individuals will enable emergency crews to improve their response times."

GMAS has received £660,000 , along with additional resources from the six Greater Manchester health authorities to fund the programme.

Basing their information on last year's figures the magazine claimed GMAS did not have call prioritisation, a service that aims to respond to 75% of the most serious calls within eight minutes. In fact, GMAS has had the service in operation since April.

GMAS added that the figures showed they had the best performance out of all ambulance services who did not have call prioritisation at the time data was compiled.