They were speaking after a damning union report earlier this year raised a number of issues with the way workers felt they were being treated by SECAmb.

The two people KentOnline spoke to also felt patients were treated as numbers as under-pressure staff reacted to round-the-clock emergency calls.

Mark Connor-Stupples, who started as a resource dispatcher in August 2023, told KentOnline: “The problems began about two months in.

“It was little bits at a time, and I thought, ‘Oh, it’s just because I’m new and I can understand if I’m making mistakes and they’re pulling me up on it’.

“But as it became more and more, I started to notice people’s attitude towards me, and it just wasn’t very nice. It’s very toxic and ‘if your face fits’.

“For a new person, you have to be a ‘yes person’. You can’t question otherwise, you get put under a certain bracket, and the team leaders on that day will whisper around to the point no one will talk to you.

“No one will even consider your existence. And you’re just very alienated and isolated.”

Mark added: “I remember when I was going to work one day, because of all the issues I’d been having, I had a thought to myself that if I didn’t arrive at work for this shift, no one would miss me.

“No one would think to call to see if I was okay.”

Specific incidents the Maidstone resident remembers are being put on a “development plan” three times by a manager.

“You have to be paired with someone really experienced to just be kept an eye on,” he explained.

“But every time I was put on one, the experienced person didn’t need to have any input in my work whatsoever, and commented things like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re on this development plan, there’s nothing wrong with your way of working’.”

No one will even consider your existence. And you’re just very alienated and isolated…

He said the criticism “knocked the confidence out of him”, adding: “From my point of view, my face probably didn’t fit or they didn’t like the way I was working because everyone has their own way.

“But instead of talking to me about it, they completely cut me out and just chucked me straight onto a development plan, which wasn’t needed.”

The way patients are treated was also a major concern for the employee, who resigned in July last year.

He said: “They’re more interested in covering their own back than actually considering everybody else’s feelings.

“As nasty as it is for me to say it, patients for them are just numbers.

“They just want to hit their targets rather than actually caring about a patient’s needs.”

While recognising the stakes are high, and response times need to be low, Mr Connor-Stupples said: “If in a certain area someone has been waiting 12 hours, I can send an ambulance, but then that one will be taken by another area because they would need it for whatever reason.

“I could read through the documentation and consider how long they’ve been waiting for and will bring it up with my team leader.

“They’re like, ‘It doesn’t matter. We need this over your reasons, so deal with it’. And it just doesn’t fit quite comfortably.”

He said that while previously not understanding why people need time off due to problems in the workplace, he himself had to take three months off.

He added: “I was really in a really dark place then. When I got to work, 10 minutes into my shift, the team leaders had pulled me up on something in front of a lot of people, and I just had a breakdown.

“It was little comments, little incidents, and they just gradually picked at it and just made a big wound.”

Between last October and November, around three months after Mr Connor-Stupples left, the NHS carried out a survey of SECAmb employees.

It “demonstrated significant improvements across all key themes”.

Of those who completed the survey, 70% felt their immediate manager cared about their concerns.

Another employee, who wishes to remain anonymous, shared similar concerns to the dispatcher.

“It was just constantly about covering your own back rather than helping people,” she said.

“There was this constant fear of being sued, so all of the training, all of the advice was constantly about noting everything, making sure there was kind of no route for us to face legal action.

“There was definitely more of an emphasis on that than getting people the help they needed.”

She worked as an emergency medical advisor answering 999 calls for four months, and also called the environment “toxic”, adding “everyone talks about each other”.

She says there was a strict dress code in place, however, this was enforced more on some employees than others.

“I was in a three-piece suit once with a skirt, and I got taken into a meeting about that being inappropriate workwear, despite other people wearing tracksuits and trainers,” she recalled.

The call handler also said the break policy was “authoritarian”, explaining: “I felt there was a lot of control over the breaks.

“They were distributed by break tokens, but these would get lost, and then the senior management team would say, ‘Now no one’s getting a break until we can find their break tokens’.”

Furthermore, she also found punishments and criticism to be overly harsh.

One call - the details of which will not be shared to protect her identity - led to claims she was lying and she was ‘told off’ for sharing her frustrations with another member of staff, she says.

“It feels like a school club where they (the leadership team) have more power than they should.

“They always say to come to them if you have a problem, but if your problem’s with them, you just don’t feel like you have anywhere to go.”

The staff member resigned soon after the call in question and says she was not given an exit interview.

Both employees, who are now in new roles with other organisations, spoke out following national media reports about concerns regarding SECAmb.

The GMB union, which represents many of the 4,000 staff, carried out a survey about their working lives.

From nearly 900 responses, the union claims they identified a culture of discrimination towards women staff members with sexual harassment, bullying, and a general “boys’ club” culture.

One in eight respondents did not feel confident that management would support them if they flagged issues concerning behaviour.

A SECAmb spokesman told KentOnline that inappropriate behaviour is not tolerated from anyone, regardless of their role in the organisation.

They added: “While we recognise that as a Trust and a sector, there remains more to be done to improve our culture, we believe we have made real progress in recent years on how most of our staff tell us it feels to work at SECAmb.

“This is reflected in the results of the most recent national NHS Staff Survey, which was completed anonymously by record numbers of SECAmb colleagues (3,268), and which demonstrated significant improvements across all key themes.

Our new Trust values of kindness, courage and integrity were chosen by our people and are the measure we use

“Through these results, we were particularly encouraged to see that close to 60% of staff said they felt safe to speak up about anything that concerned them, up from about 45% in 2022.

“We are also pleased to have been recognised by the National Guardians’ Office for the progress we have made in this area.

“We have invested significantly in our Freedom to Speak Up service and have reviewed and improved how we deal with harassment of any kind.

“Our new Trust values of kindness, courage and integrity were chosen by our people and are the measure we use in every aspect of our working lives.

“As always, we would urge anyone who feels they have been the victim of harassment or has a concern of any kind to report it, and they will be listened to.”