Overcrowded NSW hospitals impact patients

Long wait times and a lack of beds across overcrowded NSW hospital emergency departments is slowing down ambulances from getting patients in front of doctors, a parliamentary report has found.

The report into ambulance ramping - how paramedics are unable to transfer patients from the ambulance in a timely manner - found patient flow was being slowed down. 

A key issue raised in the evidence was that hospital occupancy rates are too high.

"When hospitals operate constantly at 100 per cent occupancy, they cannot admit patients from EDs during 'surge' periods or times of unexpected demand," the 131-page report, released on Thursday, said.

"This has a flow-on effect throughout the system. If patients cannot be transferred from an ED to an inpatient bed at the appropriate time, EDs become overcrowded. This in turn means that ambulances cannot offload their patients, which causes ambulance ramping".

The inquiry found the proportion of cases attended by ambulances within 15 minutes had almost halved and the percentage of patients transferred from an ambulance to an ED within 30 minutes had decreased by almost 20 per cent in the past six years.

In response, the parliamentary committee recommended NSW public hospitals be funded to operate at 85 per cent occupancy. 

The state's health budget has ballooned to $33 billion.

Labor MP Greg Donnelly, who chaired the committee, said "Patient flow is a whole-of-health system issue requiring a whole-of-health system response".

The report recommended NSW Health create a dedicated position with responsibility for patient flow across the whole of the health system.

The inquiry received 35 submissions that detailed patient care being compromised and staff suffering increasing stress and burnout, exacerbated by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing natural disasters.

It also crucially recommended that healthcare staff be duly compensated.

Paramedics and nurses have gone on strike several times this year calling for better wages and more staffing to keep up with swelling patient numbers.

Among its other recommendations, the committee said a new role to manage paramedics should be created and the responsibilities of hospital pharmacists should be increased.

Labor health spokesman Ryan Park said the report shows how the government has crippled the health system.

"Ask anyone who has called an ambulance or has been in an emergency department recently, and they know too well the reality of long wait times and people simply giving up and leaving untreated," he said on Thursday.

The NSW government has three months to respond to the committee's recommendations.

But Health Minister Brad Hazzard, who will retire from politics at the next election, noted NSW emergency departments were actually performing better than anywhere else in the country.

He took his lead from another report released on Wednesday by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showing the state's EDs had the shortest wait times in the country.

More than three quarters of ED presentations were seen on time, the highest of all states and territories, and 10 per cent higher than the national average of 67 per cent.