EAST ANGLIA'S top ambulance boss will head up a new super-size ambulance service covering six counties in the East of England.Dr Chris Carney, who is currently chief executive of the East Anglian Ambulance Trust, has been appointed chief executive of the new East of England Ambulance Service which will come into force on July 1.

EAST ANGLIA'S top ambulance boss will head up a new super-size ambulance service covering six counties in the East of England.

Dr Chris Carney, who is currently chief executive of the East Anglian Ambulance Trust, has been appointed chief executive of the new East of England Ambulance Service which will come into force on July 1.

The new service will cover Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.

Dr Carney said: “I'm very excited about the possibilities of bringing all the good work of the three existing services together under one roof.

“Each service has developed distinct areas of excellence and in pooling our resources we should be able to make further improvements to patient care.”

Dr Carney, 54, was brought in to help turn around the EAAT, itself formed from a merger of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk ambulance services, when it ran into difficulties in the late 1990s.

He said: “I have been at East Anglia for six years now and we have learned an awful lot from past experiences and how lessons learned from previous mergers can be used to benefit this new and geographically very large and diverse service.”

At about 7,500 square miles and serving more than 5 million people, the new service will be the largest geographically in the country.