THE region's ambulance chief has said the number of working paramedics in the region is now so low that the profession is on the 'at risk register.'

Paul Liversidge, chief operating officer for the North East Ambulance Service (NEAS), was speaking at the inquest of Stockton man Cecil Rudd who waited two hours for an ambulance before he died of a heart attack on September 24 last year.

Assistant Teesside Coroner Malcolm Donnelly also mentioned the deaths of two other men in 2013 while waiting more than two hours for a paramedic to arrive.

They were William Gouldburn, 73, of Rosemary Walk, Hartlepool, who waited for more than two-and-a-half hours in April, 2013 before dying of a heart attack. The other was Richard Bainton, 66, of Swallow Close, Guisborough, who made two emergency calls two hours apart before dying of a condition related to deep vein thrombosis.

However, a spokeswoman for NEAS said there was no "direct causative link" between those two deaths in 2013 and the failure of an ambulance to arrive within two hours.

The inquest at Teesside Magistrates Court yesterday (Tuesday, June 9) heard 85-year-old Mr Rudd, an 85-year-old retired bricklayer, originally from Darlington, complained he was struggling to breathe at his home on Roseberry Road, Norton, near Stockton, and his wife, Betsy Rudd, called an ambulance at about 1.30pm.

The call was designated as non-life threatening although the aim was for an ambulance to reach him in 30 minutes.

A second call was made an hour later but an ambulance still failed to arrive followed by a third call an hour after that.

This time the call was designated as an emergency and an ambulance arrived within eight minutes. But by then Mr Rudd was already dead.

A post-mortem was conducted by pathologist Dr Kaushik Dasgupta who found three vessels to Mr Rudd's heart were blocked but that his life "could have been salvaged" for at least a limited period with medical intervention.

The inquest heard that ambulance crews were under capacity but dealing with 24 emergency 999 calls at once.

Asked about the shortfall in paramedics, Mr Liversidge said: "At a national level there's a 2,000 shortfall in paramedics, 20 per cent of the total needed. There's a challenge, so much so that the profession is on the Government 'at risk' register."

Mr Liversidge said that at the time of Mr Rudd's death the number of paramedics was about 400 when it should have been 546. The situation had improved since then but still 100 paramedics were needed. Trained staff were taking up other employment opportunities despite being paid £30,000 a year. The region's ambulance service has responded to the crisis by training twice as many paramedic students a year, from 24 to 48, and trying to recruit from Poland.

The coroner, Mr Donnelly concluded that Mr Rudd had died of a "result of natural causes aggravated by lack of timely medical attendance."