PUBLIC patients are waiting longer on ambulance stretchers for emergency attention and a larger percentage are waiting more than eight hours to be transferred to a bed or operating suite compared with two years ago, the latest health department figures show.
NSW Health performance data for the September quarter, published yesterday, also showed that only eight of 41 NSW hospitals met all benchmarks for seeing emergency patients.
This was despite a decrease of 12,587 in the number of emergency attendances since the same period last year.
Over the past two years, the percentage of patients waiting more than 30 minutes to be offloaded from an ambulance into emergency has steadily increased from 19 per cent to 30 per cent.
The percentage of patients waiting more than eight hours for a ward bed or operating suite has also increased from 19 to 30 per cent since the same time two years ago.
The Opposition health spokeswoman, Jillian Skinner, said the figures reflected a lack of acute-care beds.
This clogged emergency departments with "patients waiting for a ward bed, which results in ambulances banking up because they can't offload their patients", she said.
Several hospitals, including Campbelltown, Liverpool, Canterbury, Gosford and Wyong, failed to meet three of the five emergency triage benchmarks. Gosford performed the worst in the state.
Out of the 28 Sydney hospitals measured, only six met all the benchmarks: Hornsby, Manly, Sutherland, Concord, Sydney Hospital and Sydney Eye Hospital. Royal North Shore came close.
At Prince of Wales, where emergency doctors have been threatening industrial action, only 62 per cent of patients in triage category three were seen within the required 30 minutes, against a benchmark of 75 per cent, and only 55 per cent in category four were seen within the required one hour, against a benchmark of 70 per cent.
In Sydney's west, only one hospital, Concord, met all benchmarks.
Every hospital in the North Coast Area Health Service (Coffs Harbour, Lismore, Port Macquarie and The Tweed hospitals) failed to meet at least two of the benchmarks.
Patients on the Central Coast are also let down, with both Gosford and Wyong performing particularly poorly.
At Gosford, 52 per cent of patients in triage category two were seen within the required 10 minutes (against the benchmark of 80 per cent) and 41 per cent of patients in category three within 30 minutes (benchmark 75 per cent) and 46 per cent in category four within one hour (70 per cent). At Wyong, 60 per cent of patients in category two were seen within 10 minutes and 58 per cent in category three within 30 minutes.
The NSW Health Minister, John Della Bosca, said the results reflected that there were 3072 more admissions from emergency year-on-year.
"Often these are elderly patients with a range of different illnesses and usually they require more investigation and work up in ED, prior to admission to a ward. This impacts on emergency admission performance as well as off-stretcher time," a spokesman for Mr Della Bosca said. "And this has the flow-on effect of impacting triage performance." He said NSW was the only state that met four out of five of the triage performance benchmarks overall.