Ambulance services in the North are in disarray and failing to meet their targets for responding to emergencies, the Assembly has heard.
Moving a motion expressing concern at long response times in rural areas, Mr John Fee of the SDLP said the issue was not only one of resources.
"The service at the minute is so poorly organised, so strapped by bureaucracy that we are not achieving even with the existing resources the type of responses and the type of service that we should," he said.
"The service is in total disarray," Mr Fee said, citing a review which estimated that 50 per cent of 999 calls could be answered within eight minutes, without any extra resources, if the ambulance service was run efficiently.
Mr Norman Boyd of the NIUP said recent figures highlighted the problems facing the service.
In 2001 two of the four health boards failed to meet the target of attending 50 per cent of 999 calls within eight minutes, he said.
Mr Boyd said there was a great degree of variation in response times. While Ardoyne ambulance station answered 71 per cent of calls within eight minutes the figure for Craigavon was 30 per cent, he said.
Dr Joe Hendron, chairman of the Assembly's health committee, called for extra funding for the service; in Northern Ireland it was paid £14.50 per capita compared with figures of £20 and £22.50 in Scotland and Wales.
Mr Paul Berry of the DUP called for serious consideration to be given to the possibility of amalgamating the fire and ambulance services. Mr Barry McElduff of Sinn Féin called for increased North-South co-operation on emergency ambulances.
"The Border simply needs to disappear in terms of this provision being more efficient," he said.
The Minister for Health, Ms Bairbre de Brún, said significant investment in the service had been made but warned that an increase in response times would be expensive.
"To achieve a 50 per cent response rate to all emergency calls in all board areas within eight minutes will require a recurrent minimum allocation for ambulance services of £3 million a year," she said.
She later complained that her Department's £2.5 billion budget for the coming financial year was inadequate. "I have to make it clear that the resources at my disposal are not enough to ensure that people have ready access to modern health and personal social services," she said.