THE NORTH-East Ambulance Service has been rated as “good” in its latest inspection – despite still failing to meet key targets.

The Care Quality Commission says the service, which was rated following an inspection earlier this year, had a culture of passion and enthusiasm.

It was praised for its mental health programme for staff, the research and development team which is involved in a number of trials, the strong working relationship with sports grounds to improve medical safety standards at stadia events and its use of technology help motorcyclists who have had accidents.

However, the service does not always have enough qualified staff and is still failing to meet national response targets.

Between April 2015 and March 2016 NEAS was the joint worst performing ambulance service in the NHS and is still failing to meet its target of responding to 75 per cent of the most serious incidents within eight minutes.

NEAS chief executive Yvonne Ormston said the service struggled to meet the target because of issues with recruitment.

Last year the service had around 140 vacancies for paramedics, which had been reduced to 100 at the time of the inspection in April and now stands at about 70.

The service has been recruiting nationally and in Poland and hopes to fill its current vacancies by next March, when another batch of students have qualified.

She said: “We always want to provide the best service we can and our target for red calls is to get to 75 per cent in eight minutes. Currently we’re getting to 75 per cent in nine minutes so we don’t think there’s any cause for concern.

“For the majority of our patients we do get there in a shorter time. We have a highly developed triage system to help us identify those in most need of support.”

She added: “It’s a real lift for our staff to get a good rating. They’ve done a lot of work to get to this rating We are really proud of it.”

Sir Mike Richards, chief inspector of hospitals, said: “We found a general culture of passion and enthusiasm at the trust and it was clear that everyone’s first priority was the patient.

“It was encouraging to see the improvements made in staff wellbeing, which was confirmed to us by those working at NEAS.

“The North East Ambulance Service has a lot of to be proud of and there were clearly many areas of good practice. There were also some areas for improvement and we have told the trust where it needs to make changes.”

NEAS was told it has to make sure there are appropriate arrangements in place to provide vehicle dispatch in the event of its centre being able to operate and to address its incident and complaint backlog.