THE ambulance service in Oxfordshire hopes to employ hundreds more paramedics after a dramatic surge in 999 calls.

South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) has said it is looking to bring in 230 extra staff this year after emergency calls increased by 20 per cent in the last two years.

Chief executive Steve West said that the increase in demand “was not anticipated”, but hoped that additional staff would help bolster the service’s responses to emergencies.

But the recruitment drive comes after almost 82 per cent of staff at the service said they had considered leaving due to the stress of the job.

Unison representative of SCAS and paramedic for eight years Gavin Bashford believes more needs to be done to retain staff.

The 44-year-old said: “If we manage to get 230 staff and no more staff leave then it would improve the situation.

“But at the moment we still have an awful lot leaving, I think the management is being optimistic.

“My personal view is that SCAS won’t be able to achieve the 230 more staff, but you can’t fault them for what they’re doing to recruit staff. There is, however, a lot more they could do to retain staff.”

The father-of-one said that regular “late finishes”, where paramedics are forced to continue working after their assigned shift has finished, was the main cause for stress among frontline clinical staff. SCAS said it hoped that employing more staff would help reduce the strain on current paramedics.

But in December last year, it was reported that ambulance services had to turn to Poland and Australia to plug a reported shortfall of 2,500 staff nationwide.

Chief operating officer Sue Byrne said: “We recognise that there is a national shortage of paramedics and that this is not just a SCAS issue.

“Our recruitment plans are specifically challenged to try to meet the increasing need for more and more paramedics.

“We are targeting both experienced and newly qualified paramedics as part of our recruitment plans alongside our workforce plans for 2015 and 2016 which involve a combination of extensive, continued recruitment locally, nationally and internationally.”

Ms Byrne has also said SCAS is working with universities such as Oxford Brookes to increase recruitment on to paramedic programmes.

Currently the service is paid more than £19.1m a year by Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group.

The area covered by SCAS covers more than four million residents, and it responds to about 80,000 patients a year.