Armed police are reportedly having to attend to people having cardiac arrests due to a national shortage of paramedics.

With the NHS facing its ‘greatest workforce crisis in history’, patients are being repeatedly put at risk by understaffing.

This has meant that firearms officers have become the ‘first, last and only resort’ because ambulances ‘can’t cope’ with the demand, it’s claimed.

Being pulled away from serious crime, police are spending up to a third of their time on non-policing callouts, The Independent reports.

This includes responding to mental health crises and transporting people to A&E.

Andy Cooke, HM chief inspector of constabulary, said they have been responding to pleas from their colleagues from the NHS to respond to heart attacks.

He said: ‘Recently, officers in armed response vehicles (ARVs) were being sent to reports of people who were having cardiac arrests because the ambulance service couldn’t cope with the demand, because they’re trained in first aid and to use defibrillators.

‘The ambulance service contacted the police to say “we’ve got this heart patient and we haven’t got anyone to send”.

‘Being first, last and only resort, the police will go. It’s right that they did go but that hides the problems we’ve got in the rest of the system.’

His comments come just weeks after all of England’s ambulance services were put into the highest level of alert because of ‘extreme pressures’ caused by the hot weather.

At the time, crews were being held outside hospitals for too long as overcrowding inside delayed handovers.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council has also warned that officers are having to transport patients to hospital due to a lack of ambulances.

This sometimes means they must wait for hours in A&E with mentally ill and vulnerable people who have not committed a crime.

Chief Constable Olivia Pinkney, the national lead for local policing, stressed this reduces the police ability to fight crime and protect people.

‘It can also put officers in situations where they are having to make decisions that they are not best placed to make, despite their best endeavours,’ she added.

This is just a snapshot of the scale of difficultly the ambulance workforce is facing daily.

Earlier this year, a report from the Unison union said that emotional breakdowns, sleep problems, mood swings and the use of anti-depressants are among the issues reported by staff dealing with unprecedented demand for months.

Metro.co.uk has contacted the NHS for a comment.

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