"We’ve just experienced the longest flu season in a decade – the longest since the 2009 pandemic – and hospital presentations have been unrelenting since January," NSW Health deputy secretary Susan Pearce said. Overall, NSW emergency departments recorded their worst timeliness-of-care results in five years, with three in 10 patients waiting too long for treatment (29.8 per cent). Almost one-third of patients spent more than four hours in an emergency department (31.9 per cent). The median time patients spent in emergency departments was three hours and one minute and one in 10 patients spent eight hours and six minutes. The report showed one in six patients brought in by ambulance waited longer than 30 minutes to be transferred from paramedics to emergency staff.

Ambulance crews were swamped, responding to 320,000 call outs – a 7.6 per cent increase on the same quarter last year. Grappling with more than 3 million patients in one year is the new reality for the emergency departments – roughly 1 million more patients than a decade ago. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Hospitals can no longer expect a brief abatement from the rising deluge of patients in the traditionally slower April to June quarter. "Demand has remained very high every quarter, leading up to another record number of presentations in this latest busy winter period," BHI chief executive Dr Diane Watson said.

Australian Medical Association NSW president Kean-Seng Lim said the health system was in a "critical condition". So far this year NSW hospitals have treated a group about the size of Brisbane’s population, Dr Lim said. "This is not normal. This is not something our hospitals were built to cope with." "Doctors, nurses, and other health staff are working heroically under very poor conditions but the pressure is just too great and we are seeing this in the performance figures." Dr Lim urged state and federal governments to focus on reducing the extreme levels of demand put on hospitals. "We need to integrate care more effectively between GPs and hospitals, improve our use of technology, and set up systems aimed at preventing the need for patients to go hospital," he said.

The report also showed hospitals performed more elective surgeries than ever before in a quarter – more than 61,916 procedures – and 96.6 per cent were performed within the recommended time frames (30 days for urgent, 90 days for semi-urgent and 365 days for non-urgent procedures). The median waiting times for urgent and semi-urgent elective surgeries were stable (11 days and 45 days respectively) but there was a significant increase in waiting times for non-urgent elective surgery, with patients waiting a median of 241 days (a 13-day increase) compared with the same quarter last year. At the end of the quarter, 690 patients were still waiting for surgery more than 12 months after joining the waiting list – 270 more than the same quarter last year. On Wednesday NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said it was time the federal government enacted reforms to stop people unnecessarily presenting at EDs. A reform would be to enact appropriate rebates for GPs, he said. National figures also released on Wednesday showed emergency department and elective surgery waiting times were getting longer across almost every state and territory in 2018-2019.

A total of 8.4 million people presented to Australia’s emergency departments – roughly 23,000 a day and up 4.2 per cent on 2017-2018, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed. More than one in four patients (29 per cent) waited longer than clinically recommended for treatment – determined by their triage category, higher than the previous year’s 26 per cent. Loading NSW admitted the highest proportion of patients within clinically recommended time frames (97 per cent), and Tasmania the lowest (60.4 per cent). Nationally, 890,000 patients joined public hospital elective surgery waiting lists over the financial year, though only 760,000 patients were admitted for surgery over the period – leaving 130,000 waiting.