Hospitals “desperate” to free up beds could be putting patients in danger, The Independent has been told.

NHS trusts are being forced into “risky behaviours” in the push to free up hospital beds and A&E departments, experts have warned.

It comes as new data reveals that waits for ambulance crews outside hospitals hit 26 hours in September, with more than 4,000 patients likely to have experienced severe harm due to delays.

In documents leaked to The Independent, hospital leaders in Cornwall warned staff that current pressures in its emergency care system combined with ambulance delays have “tragically resulted in deaths”.

Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust and the Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust said in the document that ambulance delays and waits in A&E were causing a “risk to life”, and that as a result they were planning to begin discharging patients into the care of the voluntary sector.

An NHS boss who had a stroke was taken to A&E by her husband rather than calling for an ambulance because of concerns over long waits.

In a series of tweets, Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust chief executive Deborah Lee praised his swift actions.

She said he had “bundled her into his car”, last week, after she had showed the signs of a stroke because he had heard her “lamenting ambulance delays”.

She is recovering but says it may have been different if they had called 999.

Waits for an ambulance in England are the longest since new targets were introduced, in 2017.

And Ms Lee’s regional service – the South West – has the longest waits in the country, with category-two calls, which include strokes, taking nearly two hours, on average, to reach patients in March.

The target is 18 minutes.

In the tweets, Ms Lee said: “Naturally, I am eternally grateful to my husband for his swift actions… but I can’t get one thing out of my head.

“What if my husband hadn’t been there and my daughter had called for an ambulance and I’d been put in the cat[egory]-two stack?”

She went on to say it was not the fault of the ambulance service and the whole system was “working unrelentingly to solve this but to no great avail”.

Ms Lee said hospitals were struggling to discharge patients, because of a lack of social care, and so delays were building up in the rest of the system.

Living in one of the remotest communities in England, the residents of Alston Moor in Cumbria count themselves lucky to be surrounded by the breathtaking peaks of the Pennines.

But living somewhere so beautiful comes with downsides – there are just a couple of pubs, it is many miles to the nearest supermarket and a takeaway delivery is out of the question.

And now the community of 2,500 people is at risk of losing what it believes is vital to its health and survival – its local ambulance service. Alston Moor currently has four emergency medical technicians (EMTs) who live locally and operate an ambulance serving the 80-square-mile area.

But if North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) proposals go ahead, the EMTs will be replaced by a community first responder – a trained member of the public rather than a professional – who can reach an emergency quickly to help patients until an ambulance arrives from elsewhere in the county.

More than 200 people silently protested against the plans outside a meeting between the parish council and NWAS last week. District councillor and local GP Michael Hanley said the removal of the service could cost lives. “Never have we had a situation where we haven’t had a local ambulance.If we rely on Penrith or Carlisle, it can take two to three hours for an ambulance to come, and the community first responders are not trained to the same level at all as the EMTs.

“[Doctors] talk about the ‘golden hour’ – the time between when the person rings on the phone to getting them to hospital – so if there’s something very dire like a severe heart attack or a severe accident, that first hour is very, very important. If it takes two-and-a-half to three hours for an ambulance to get here, it’s possible some people will die,” he said.

A jet suit for paramedics which would see patients reached in minutes by a “flying” medic has been tested by the Great North Air Ambulance Service.

After a year of talks between GNAAS and Gravity Industries, a first test flight was carried out in the Lake District.

Andy Mawson, director of operations at GNAAS, came up with the idea and described seeing it as “awesome”.

He said it meant a paramedic could “fly” to a fell top in 90 seconds rather than taking 30 minutes on foot.

Mr Mawson said: “There are dozens of patients every month within the complex but relatively small geographical footprint of the Lakes.

“We could see the need. What we didn’t know for sure is how this would work in practice. Well we’ve seen it now and it is, quite honestly, awesome.”

Mr Mawson said the exercise had demonstrated the huge potential of using jet suits to deliver critical care services.