MOTHER-of-three Christina Westmorland thought she was close to taking her last breath as she waited for an agonising hour to get to hospital.

She had to wait half an hour for an ambulance to arrive at her home in Dursley - and another half an hour to get to Frenchay Hospital, where she was finally treated.

Mrs Westmorland said she was "petrified" by the experience and puts the incident down to cutbacks at Great Western Ambulance Service (GWAS).

Fears were raised in July about the ambulance service in Dursley after the Gazette reported that ambulance crews were to be withdrawn between the hours of 2am and 10am every day.

A county paramedic also revealed that Dursley had been without ambulances for a whole weekend and that this was not an isolated incident.

Mrs Westmorland, of Tilsdown, Dursley, fell ill in the early hours of Sunday, August 27.

She said: "I had a sore throat that night and I had taken some tablets before I went out. At about 3am I just woke up and could not breathe.

"I was making an awful hooping noise. My husband rang an ambulance but it took so long to get here.

"If the ambulance had come from the station up the road it would have taken less than 10 minutes.

"It was really, really frightening, I was so scared. I really thought that was it for me."

Doctors put the sudden loss of breath down to something Mrs Westmorland had eaten or the tablets she had taken for her sore throat. They have also warned it could happen again at any time.

"If this happened again I would be absolutely petrified. They should at least keep one ambulance on at night - that is when people are seriously ill.

"I got there just in time, but what about the next person? What would happen if there was a bad accident here?" she added.

Her husband Ray said he was "disgusted" by the service after watching his wife suffer for an hour until she was treated at hospital.

"It was the worst nightmare. At the time she was convinced she was going to die and I was thinking the same, it was terrifying. There was nothing I could do to help her.

"Five years ago I had a heart attack and an ambulance came in a couple of minutes, so I expected the same this time," he said.

A spokesman for GWAS apologised for the delay in getting to her.

He said: "Great Western Ambulance Service regrets that there was a delay in reaching a patient in the Dursley area in the early hours of last Sunday morning.

"In a call classified as life threatening, we make every effort to reach a patient within eight minutes or less from the time a call is received.We apologise that we did not achieve that on this occasion."

He said that extra 24 hour cover from emergency care practitioners (ECPs) had now been put in place in the Dursley and Stroud areas to improve response times.