NSW hospitals are being paralysed by widespread bed block, triggering potentially life-threatening delays in treatment for the state’s sickest patients in emergency departments, even as thousands are diverted to urgent and virtual care services.

The latest Bureau of Health Information data revealed that hospitals are failing new wait-time targets set by the state government amid record waves of patients needing emergency and urgent medical care, as hospital admissions hit a record 515,245 in the April to June quarter.

The report released on Wednesday also showed record numbers of surgeries have cleared thousands of patients from the overdue waitlist, but patients needing non-urgent procedures are waiting longer than ever.

Health Minister Ryan Park said the government’s concerted efforts to divert the least sick people away from EDs to urgent care clinics and virtual services were working, with record low numbers of “non-urgent” triage 5 presentations in April to June.

Overall, more ED patients started their treatment on time (65.7 per cent – up 2 percentage points from the same quarter in 2024), and there was less ambulance ramping, with 79.3 per cent of patients transferred from paramedics to ED staff within 30 minutes.

But as the patients with minor injuries and illnesses fell away, record numbers of triage 2 “emergency” and triage 3 “urgent” patients were brought in.

It is these patients, the sickest in the system, who get stuck for hours in EDs, said Dr Rhys Ross-Browne, an emergency physician and faculty chair of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine.

Just 33.1 per cent of patients were admitted or transferred to another hospital within six hours – well below the state government’s 80 per cent “hospital access target”.

“This tells us the system is access blocked,” Ross-Browne said. “Wards are full, which flows back to EDs, where we see patients spending long periods in waiting rooms, on stretchers, in corridors or in ED treatment spaces when they should be in a hospital bed.”

Overall, more than one in three ED patients waited too long for treatment.

“It’s been a brutal flu season,” Ross-Browne said. “It really hits us hard with big influxes in really sick patients … who have got cancer, or are elderly or frail with chronic health conditions like chronic heart failure and chronic lung disease.”

One in 10 patients spent longer than 13 hours and six minutes in urban EDs. At Westmead Hospital – one of the busiest in the state – one in 10 patients didn’t leave the ED for at least 20 hours, and 84.5 per cent of patients waited longer than six hours to be admitted to hospital or transferred.

At Blacktown Hospital, one in 10 spent at least 19 hours and 30 minutes there and 85.8 per cent waited longer than six hours to be admitted or transferred.

Backlogs carry very real and dire risks for patients.

“Patients in access-blocked facilities experience high rates of mortality, morbidity, and delays in care,” Ross-Browne said.

“We know that there are huge numbers of patients in acute hospital beds across NSW that don’t need to be there, that are waiting for residential aged care or NDIS supportive accommodation and have nowhere else to go.”

Park said significant progress had been made to reduce wait times and ambulance ramping, including the recruitment of almost 500 more ED nurses, but there was still more to be done.

Park’s office reported 222,000 patients had avoided EDs in the year to June 30, 2025, thanks to Healthdirect and urgent care clinics.

“During periods of high demand, those with less urgent conditions can experience longer wait times when there are large numbers of seriously unwell patients being prioritised for emergency care,” Park said.

“I want to remind the community of your options for care outside of the hospital, which could spare you an unnecessary wait in an ED.”

More surgeries, longer wait times

There were a record 64,751 elective surgeries performed in NSW, up 9.6 per cent compared with the same quarter in 2024. They included 4033 contracted to private theatres.

But the median wait time for patients needing non-urgent surgery was a record high 343 days – up 42 days from the same quarter in 2024.

The median wait time for semi-urgent patients was 62 days – up eight days.

About one in three (32.9 per cent) non-urgent patients waited longer than the clinically recommended 365 days compared to 17.6 per cent in the same quarter last year. One in 10 of these patients waited at least 430 days.

Dr Kathryn Austin, president of the Australian Medical Association NSW, said these wait times were unacceptable.

“The reality is stark: without more doctors in our hospitals, waiting lists will keep growing and patients will keep suffering,” Austin said.

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