Dr Andre Cromhout, clinical director of the Emergency Department at Wellington Hospital, says EDs can be blocked up when there's a shortage of beds.

About 700 lives have been spared in emergency departments across the country thanks to a push to get patients admitted quickly, new research says.

In 2009, the Government introduced a national target to shorten the length of stay in ED in an effort to help reduce overcrowding, improve health outcomes for patients, and improve acute hospital services.

Two years later, it was revealed that Wellington patients were waiting the longest to be seen in EDs, with one-in-four having to wait longer than six hours.

Latest figures from July-September for Capital & Coast DHB (CCDHB) show wait times meant 85 per cent of patients in Wellington EDs were seen in less than six hours.

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This is below the national target of 95 per cent, but CCDHB spokesman Chas Te Runa said the number of patients through the door climbed to more than 15,000 patients in the last quarter, which put increased pressure on the ED.

Auckland City Hospital emergency medicine director Dr Peter Jones, who co-led a $1.1 million investigation into the outcome of the mandatory six-hour national target, said it was associated with a "substantial" 50 per cent reduction in the number of emergency department deaths.

The target had also seen the average length of time patients were spending in ED reduce by over an hour. For those patients who required admission to hospital, the length of their ED stay had reduced by about three hours.

Wellington Hospital emergency department clinical director Dr Andre Cromhout said bed shortages, due to lengthy hospital stays, was one of the reasons patients sometimes had to wait a long time in ED.

"If an elderly person can't go into a residential care facility for whatever reason they stay in hospital, and that blocks up a bed, and that in turn blocks up ED."

And with an ageing population, that problem was not going away, so there was a need to address end of life care, Cromhout said.

"We need to talk to the elderly community about what they really want - do they want antibiotics, do they want to be on life support or a ventilator.

"We are often faced with that dilemma – do we admit, do we treat, do we send them home? And that's not a five minute conversation."

According to the latest quarterly results. 93 per cent of ED patients were admitted, discharged or transferred within six hours. This still falls short of the national target of 95 per cent, but Jones said it still indicated huge progress.

"[It's] about 700 fewer deaths than predicted if pre-target trends had continued. This result mirrors the 50 per cent reduction in emergency department crowding," he said.

"There was also no increase in deaths on the wards, so there was no evidence that the observed reduction was due to 'shifting' deaths to elsewhere in the system."

The study examined a range of indicators of quality of patient care in 18 of New Zealand's 20 district health boards from 2006 to 2012, and included an in-depth investigation of four hospitals.

It was supported by a $1.1 million grant from the Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC).