Some Australian hospitals are so full that patients are waiting longer than two days on trolleys to be admitted for further treatment such as surgery, a study conducted last month has revealed.

An audit of 114 public hospital emergency departments at 10am on Monday August 31 found that seven out of 10 patients had been waiting longer than eight hours to be transferred into the main hospital, even though emergency staff had completed their job of stabilising the patients and determining what they needed next.

Emergency doctors say the delay in admitting patients to hospital from emergency departments is causing chaos. Credit:Nicolas Walker

The queues were so bad that 78 patients in 23 hospitals had been waiting longer than 24 hours to get into a hospital ward for further care. Six patients had been waiting for more than two days.

Emergency doctors said the phenomenon, known as "access block" was causing dangerous chaos for doctors, nurses and patients, as well as paramedics who get "ramped" waiting to handover new patients to emergency department staff.