FINES levied against the ambulance service may be reinvested to improve its performance.

The East of England Ambulance Service has been fined £1.5million for failing to get to emergencies in time and taking too long to get patients out of ambulance and into hospitals.

However rather than taking the cash away from the struggling service clinical commissioning groups may let the ambulance service keep the money to get better.

This would be on top of an extra £14million given by the commissioning groups to help improve the service this year.

A contract query notice was issued against the ambulance service after concerns were raised about its poor performance.

In theory persistent failures to hit targets could lead to contracts being terminated but there is only one major ambulance service in the east of England and the focus is on improving the service.

Wendy Tankard, chief contracts officer for the Suffolk commissioning groups, which lead the commissioning consortium, said: “We continue to work with the East of England Ambulance Service in transforming the service.

“This work has included additional investment from the CCGs over and above the contract price to support EEAST in their £9 million transformation programme.

“Mandatory financial consequences to date are £1.5 million, but we will be working with the ambulance service over what proportion of this will be applied at the end of the year so that the Trust can continue its turnaround.”