MORE than 157,000 victims, including those who suffered from a heart attack and stroke, have been left waiting for more than an hour for an ambulance in 2018, it has been revealed.

The victims were among those who suffered delays after new rules were introduced last year to prioritise urgent cases, The Daily Mail reports.

In one severe case, a patient was forced to wait for more than 18 hours after operators accidentally cancelled their call.

Last year there was a shake-up of 999 response times that was meant to give the most urgent calls priority.

This meant the original eight-minute target was scrapped and the emergencies were classified in two ways.

Category 1 calls are considered the most life-threatening and were given a seven-minute response time.

The category 2 cases, which heart attacks and strokes fall under, were given a response time of up to 18 minutes.

The Daily Mail has obtained data showing patients who fall into the category 2 are forced to wait much longer for paramedics to arrive.

The figures show a total of 157,370 category 2 calls that had to wait at least an hour for an ambulance this year, according to figures from seven of the 10 ambulance trusts in England.

This comes despite experts saying that every minute counts for heart attack and stroke patients.

Labour have also released their own figures that show on average how response targets for both new categories have been missed every month since they were introduced.

Ambulance trusts missed the category 2 response target of 18 minutes by almost 12 minutes in the worst months, according to their analysis.

Ambulances services across England are already struggling to cope with the soaring number of 999 calls, delays outside over-stretched A&E units and a shortage of staff.

Only 3,365 “red calls”, which did include heart attacks and strokes in the old system, were delayed longer than an hour in 2017.

The longest delay for a category 2 call was recorded at 18 hours and 37 minutes by the South East Coast Ambulance Service.

A spokesman said the call was “cancelled in error” before being “reopened”.

Rachel Power, of the Patients Association, said the Mail’s figures were matter of a “profound concern” and were “literally a matter of life or death” as she called for additional funding for the ambulance service.

An NHS England spokesman told the Mail: “Anyone in a life-threatening situation is treated as a priority and response times to the most seriously ill and injured patients have never been better, with an extra £36million funding to help areas deliver even more improvements.”

A South East Coast Ambulance spokesman told The Mail: “There are times when we may take longer to reach a patient due to periods of increased demand [when] we ensure we prioritise our response to our most seriously ill and injured patients.”