East Midlands’ ambulance trust is set to invest more than £20 million hiring more staff and deploying more vehicles on the region’s roads.
Report by Local Democracy Reporter – Lauren Monaghan
More emergency staff and more vehicles will be put on the East Midlands’ roads courtesy of a multi-million investment from ambulance bosses.
East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) has managed to secure a £26 million investment to boost capacity in its service between 2026 and 2029.
By 2029, EMAS will have recruited up to 400 extra patient-facing staff on top of its usual recruitment levels along with 40 new double-crewed ambulances to respond to emergencies.
The trust, which has more than 5,000 staff currently, already employs around 200 frontline staff each year on average, which covers the usual gaps left by retiring employees and those looking to leave the service.
With the cash boost, this means its recruitment levels should double over the next two years, with 400 frontline staff hoped to be brought in, in 2026 and 400 in 2027 – around 800 new employees instead of the expected 400.
Speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), Will Legge, deputy chief executive at EMAS, called it a “significant addition” to the organisation and allows the trust to “go further” in reducing its response times.
He said: “We’ve been consistently bringing down our response times over the last three years and this is our opportunity to go further for patients.
“From what we’ve worked out, [the addition] is enough, however, every year things change so the demand on the service changes, the patient requirements change, from everything we’ve worked out now, this is enough.”
The average response time for the trust dealing with category two incidences – people with a serious condition, such as stroke or chest pain, which may require a quick assessment and/or urgent transport – has dropped since 2024.
Between April 2024 to March 2025, its average response time stood at 43 minutes and eight seconds, dropping to 38 minutes and 51 sections between April 2025 to March 2026 and by April 2026 this stood at 29 minutes and 50 seconds.
Mr Legge said “it’s not just front-facing roles” that EMAS is looking to recruit at the moment, where it will need extra mechanics to support the additional ambulances on the roads – these roles are separate to the additional front-line staff.
He said: “We’ll be able to respond to patients in the communities quicker than we do right now. It adds capacity across the whole of the East Midlands, so that when patients ring 999 and they need an ambulance, we’re able to dispatch an ambulance and for it to arrive with them quicker than it does today.
The LDRS asked Mr Legge if he expects the extra ambulances to have a detrimental impact on the amount of ambulances made to wait outside the region’s A&E departments in periods when demand surges.
Ambulance trusts across the country have been battling extreme delays in their pre-handover windows – the period when an ambulance arrives outside A&E to when they hand the patient over to A&E staff – when demand booms, such as during winter periods.
The national target for a pre-handover is 15 minutes, where anything over that time counts as time lost, and in January 2026 EMAS lost more than 19,500 pre-handover hours – its worst since April 2025.
He said: “We continually work with all of our hospitals to try minimise handover delays. Our primary aim for these new vehicles and staff is for them to be out there in the community, responding to patients, not held at hospital.”
He called the funding boost an “incredible opportunity” to improve response times and offer employment to frontline professionals.
The trust is expecting the extra staff and ambulances to be fully operational from April 2028.
The extra ambulances will also help EMAS reduce its reliance on private ambulance crews, which has been operating in high numbers recently.
In February, EMAS was using 56 private ambulance service crews each day on average and figures released in May said the trust was still using an average of 55 a day to “mitigate handover delays” and pressures at that time.
This week, EMAS has opened opportunities for qualified technicians and urgent care assistants to join its service, alongside advertising for qualified mechanics.
