A senior East Midlands Ambulance Service boss says it still has a "long way to go" to meet targets on cutting the amount of time crews are taking to get to patients involved the second most serious category of emergency call.

In January, the NHS and Government set out national targets for ambulance services to have a mean average response time for 'category two' calls of 30 minutes for 2023/24.

The overall response time target remains at 18 minutes, which will be expected of all ambulance services by 2024/25.

But as of March, East Midlands Ambulance Service has an average response time of 50 minutes for 'category two' calls.

At the EMAS board meeting on April 4, one board member said there was "a long way to go" for the service to hit the target.

'Category one' classified calls are emergencies involving people with the most serious life-threatening injuries and illnesses and 'category two' is for other calls still classed as emergencies.

Category three is for urgent calls and category four is for less urgent calls.

Richard Henderson, Chief Executive, said the meeting was "an opportunity to reflect on the challenges that we faced last year".

He said: "We all know that from a delivery perspective, performance was not where any one of us would've wanted it to be.

"We understand the well-documented challenges that the NHS and health and social care system has faced.

"I am confident that we will start seeing an improvement as we move through this year.

"As we know, the requirement for EMAS and other ambulance services for the year of 23/24 will be to deliver a category two mean of 30 minutes."

Jeff Worrall, non-executive director, said: "At the moment we are at 50 minutes so there's a long way to go.

"We need to start to see the trajectory against that because it is still quite a distance to get to."

Jackie Jones, Associate non executive director, added: "The focus next year is going to be around bringing category two down to 30 minutes.

"But category three is nearly five hours above the standard.

"There's a bit of a risk that everybody focuses on bringing category two down and category three gets forgotten."

Mr Henderson said the trust's focus will "remain on all categories".

He added: "From a national standard perspective, the standard remains as 18 minutes.

"The requirement is for the ambulance sector to return to 18 minutes for category two by 24/25.

"There is a transitional period this year of a minimum standard of 30 minutes.

"We will not be changing our mindset, the standard will remain 18 minutes.

"We know the right thing to do for patients is to get there as quickly as possible and to maintain our focus on speed of response.

"Last year was extremely challenging for a variety of reasons.

"Given our starting position this year and all the plans in place, we know we will see improvements in delivery, patient experience, patient outcome and staff welfare. "

"That's what we have to keep a focus on this year."

Karen Tomlinson, Chair, added: "Performance has got to improve, there is no question about it. We've got to push on that and make sure we do deliver.

"We need a trajectory so if we are at 50 minutes at the moment we need to know at what point we're going to get down."