WE ARE beginning to wonder just how many critical reports into the ambulance service in Wales it is going to take before the Assembly administration gets to grips with this issue.

In our view radical action is now long overdue. The people who are suffering are the patients who are not receiving a good enough service and the ambulance workers who, this latest report reveals, no longer trust their bosses, feel alienated by the change process and are suffering from low morale because of the bullying and blame culture within their workplace.

The latest critique of how the ambulance service in Wales is progressing makes depressing reading, especially for those of us living and working in this south east corner of Wales which has the most problematic service in the whole country.

But much of what the audit committee's report states is not new.

What is equally worrying for us is that this sorry state of affairs has been allowed to drag on for so long.

The modernisation programme which was intended to improve the service was first unveiled almost two years ago in the wake of two damning reports into our ambulance service.

And while the report says significant improvements have been made in some areas, the pace of change has been slow and the over-ambitious programme has had to be scaled down in order to be achievable.

We are still enduring a situation which sees ambulances tied up for inordinately long periods of time at accident and emergency departments. This is utterly unjustifiable and causes a serious knock-on effect on the performance of the service across the whole of our region. Although it has to be said that this is a situation which is out of the control of the ambulance service.

In recent weeks this paper has criticised the service for delays in attending emergencies.

What the audit committee report reveals is that such problems are unlikely to disappear in the near future.