SOUTH East Coast Ambulance (SEACAmb) declared an emergency “business continuity incident” for nearly four hours on New Year’s Day, as the service became overwhelmed by the volume of calls.

Staff breaks were suspended and off-duty staff were called back to work during the incident, which was triggered when staff were left with more than 150 unassigned calls.

In the six hours between 10pm on New Year’s Eve and 4am on January 1, the trust handled around 1,200 calls and crews attended some 600 incidents across Kent, Surrey and Sussex.

Crews responded to more than 1,300 incidents up to 1.30pm on January 1 and attended around 2,300 incidents on December 31, an increase of more than 300 on New Year’s Eve in 2015.

A SECAmb spokesman said: “We went to a business continuity incident (BCI) as a result of the significant number of 999 calls we were receiving on January 1. This incident was triggered at 12.45pm and was in place until 4.10pm.

“By declaring a BCI, this gave the trust flexibility to suspend, where necessary, staff meal breaks and call on off-duty response capable managers to support emergency operational duties.

“It also allows us to use our clinicians in our control centres to review all non-life threatening category C 60-minute calls and healthcare professional requests for transport to establish, wherever possible, if patients can make their own way to hospital, seek alternatives or make them aware that there will be a delay in us sending an ambulance.

“Staff did a fantastic job on Sunday, and, as result of requests for assistance, we were able to put out seven extra ambulances over the course of the afternoon, we also had a number of managers come into our control centres and attend hospitals to ensure handovers took place as quickly as possible.”

Issuing an SoS on the day, the trust’s on-call gold incident commander Richard Webber said: “We are receiving a very high volume of calls and are not reaching many of these as quickly as we would like.

“We are focusing our efforts on responding to calls which are deemed life-threatening. The public can help us by avoiding calling us for non-life-threatening emergencies and seeking alternative treatment from other healthcare providers or if they do require hospital treatment look to make their own way there.”

“People are reminded to only dial 999 in the event of a serious emergency and remember the other options available, such as calling NHS 111.

Life-threatening and serious calls were prioritised while the incident lasted for nearly four hours, and control staff and ambulance crews worked to get to those in the most need as quickly as possible. Patients in a non-life threatening condition had to wait longer than usual for an ambulance.