AMBULANCE bosses in the North-East have hit back at a report yesterday which claims their service is among the worst performers in the country.

The Consumers' Association watchdog magazine, Health Which? says it has devised the only true picture of how ambulance trusts are performing from the patient's perspective as opposed to data based on ambulance service response times.

It says that up to 3,000 lives are being lost a year because trusts are not performing as well as they should.

In its report, the consumer magazine shows data revealing the number of cases where paramedics successfully restarted a patient's heart after a heart attack - known as return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC).

The watchdog quizzed 15 trusts and found "shocking variations" across the country.

The Staffordshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust achieved 232 ROSCs per year per million of the population compared with 58 in the North-East and 57 in Avon.

But Colin Cessford, director of clinical standards with North-East Ambulance Service said the report did not compare "like with like".

Each trust had different ways of collecting clinical data and theirs did not include, for example, cases where patients were brought back to life for only a few seconds which other trusts included.