Ambulance response times in Somerset are dangerously slow, with patients waiting hours for emergency care and lives being lost as a result, a local MP has told parliament.

Sarah Dyke, Liberal Democrat MP for Glastonbury and Somerton, told parliament a harrowing story of a local resident whose wife died after waiting seven hours for an ambulance.

She described how when paramedics finally arrived, they lacked the training to move the patient downstairs, leading to further delays that ultimately cost her life.

"Unacceptable ambulance response times have become endemic in the UK," said Dyke. "People are left in pain and distress, and in some cases, it is costing them their lives."

MPs from across the political spectrum agreed that the South West is among the worst-affected regions.

The South Western Ambulance Service is consistently missing NHS targets, with figures revealing just how long patients are being forced to wait.

Category 1 calls – the most serious life-threatening emergencies – should be answered within seven minutes. Category 2 calls, including strokes and heart attacks, should be reached within 18 minutes.

But in January 2025, the average response time for category 2 calls in the South West was 51 minutes and 45 seconds, almost three times the target.

"Most people in Somerset will sadly know someone who has faced a heartbreakingly long wait for an ambulance," Dyke said. "I've heard from residents who have waited as long as 13 hours for emergency care."

In a controversial move, the South Western Ambulance Service is considering a "drop and go" policy, where paramedics would leave patients at hospitals without an official handover to A&E staff.

The idea is to get ambulances back on the road faster, but MPs have warned this will only add to the chaos in already overstretched emergency departments.

"The NHS standard contract says that 100% of handovers should be completed within 60 minutes," Dyke pointed out. "Yet in January 2025, over half of all handovers in the South West took longer than 30 minutes, 30% worse than the England average."

MPs also highlighted wider failings in social care as a key factor in the ambulance crisis. More than 12,000 hospital patients in England are currently unable to be discharged because of a lack of social care provision, leading to a severe shortage of hospital beds.

The Liberal Democrats have proposed a free personal care system, similar to Scotland's model, to ease the pressure on hospitals.

"The problems in the healthcare system will never be fixed unless we urgently address the social care crisis," Dyke said. "One in seven hospital beds are taken up by patients who are medically fit for discharge but have nowhere to go."

Health Minister Ashley Dalton admitted that the crisis was severe but insisted the government was investing £26 billion in the NHS. A new ambulance response target aims to bring category 2 wait times down to 30 minutes by 2025-26.

"We are prioritising patient safety and working to get A&E and ambulance response times back to NHS constitutional standards," Dalton told MPs. "But we must also address the root causes—reducing avoidable ambulance dispatches, tackling handover delays, and ensuring better co-ordination between services."

Ms Dyke, however, dismissed the long-term promises and called for urgent action to tackle the crisis now. She demanded the publication of localised ambulance response data so communities know how their areas are affected, a reduction in hospital bed occupancy rates to 85% by increasing the number of staffed hospital beds, and the creation of a £1.5 billion winter resilience fund to help tackle NHS pressures immediately.

"We cannot afford to kick this can any further down the road," she warned. "Lives are at stake."

With the government preparing to publish its long-awaited 10-year health plan, the pressure is now on to fix the ambulance crisis before more lives are lost.

"People deserve to know that when they call 999, help will arrive in time to save a life," Ms Dyke said. "Right now, for too many people, that simply isn't the case."