A TWO-year-old girl with head injuries had to be driven to hospital by car when no ambulance was available .

Jamie Stickland, 33, who works in security and lives in Lancing, called for an ambulance after his daughter, Isla, tripped and fell while playing in the outdoor communal area of their block of flats.

She smashed her face on the concrete step, and amongst other injuries had a cut on her forehead, a graze on her nose, a laceration under her nose which was 3cm wide and a 3cm cut on her bottom lip.

Her lower frenulum, the part which connects the bottom lip to the gum, was completely severed.

“My wife was trying to stop the bleeding while I was on the phone,” he said.

“The woman on the other end of the line asked me how much blood she was losing, and was it enough to fill a quarter of a cup. I said yes, and she asked if it was enough to fill half a cup, and I said no.

“She said ‘can you take her to hospital yourself?’

“I asked if she was joking and I said I couldn’t really because she was hysterical and wouldn’t want to sit in a car, but she said ‘there’s nothing else I can do.’

“I was angry but I didn’t want to waste any more time on the phone so we took her to Worthing A&E.”

Isla was seen quickly but spent three hours there having her injuries treated, and was given an appointment at the specialist unit in Chichester the next morning where she was given nine stitches.

Jamie added: “The work the ambulance service does is second to none, but if there have been so many cuts made that they can’t come and get a two-year-old girl with multiple head injuries when the football is on, something should be done.”

A spokesman from South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SECAmb) said: “All calls are triaged based on information provided by the caller.

“We have been and continue to be extremely busy. This is as a result of the prolonged hotter weather and periods of higher demand linked to the World Cup.

“At particularly busy periods this means that, in order to protect our response to life-threatening emergencies, less serious calls will receive a longer response and we cannot send an ambulance to every call.

“We appreciate that this can be frustrating and would happily look into these concerns in more detail should the family wish to contact us directly.”

He added that on July 7, when the accident happened, the ambulance service was, at times, busier than its busiest night of the year, New Year’s Eve.

He confirmed additional resources have been placed to meet the high demand, with staff working extremely hard. The Argus asked if an ambulance would have attended a similar case in ordinary circumstances, but the spokesman said he was unable to comment.