Emergency department presentations 'outpacing' NSW population growth

The report, released on September 18, shows the performance for public health services in NSW from April to June 2024.

There were 795,817 emergency department (ED) attendances from April to June, up 3.3 per cent from the same time last year, and only marginally lower (1.8 per cent) than the record-breaking January to March 2024 quarter.

One key indicator of hospital performance is patients starting their ED treatment on time (for example triage category 2, the benchmark ten minutes).

Just 63.7 per cent of patients started their treatment on time - down 2.1 percentage points compared with the same time a year earlier.

The percentage of all patients who had their treatment start on time was 58.3 per cent in urban hospitals and 73.4 per cent in rural hospitals.

The worst-performing hospital was Manning Base Hospital which had just 44 per cent of presenting patients treated on time, then Maitland Hospital (45 per cent) and Gosford Hospital attended to 47 per cent of its ED patients on time.

The best-performing regional health service was Deniliquin which attended to 95 per cent of patients on time, followed by Kurri Kurri Hospital (95.3 per cent) and Narrabri Hospital (89.8 per cent).

Overall, ambulance activity reached a new record of 385,345 responses, up 7.8 per cent on the same time a year earlier.

The percentage of cases with a call to ambulance arrival time within 15 minutes was 45.9 per cent in urban areas and 44.5 per cent in rural areas.

Despite the increase, response times remained relatively stable.

BHI chief executive Dr Diane Watson said the record demand for ambulance and ED services was worth further investigation.

"BHI conducted special analysis of the past decade of data to determine to what extent increasing demand has been driven by population growth," Dr Watson said.

"Demand for ED and ambulance services has outpaced NSW population growth since 2017-18.

"During this period, ED attendances grew 3.4 per cent faster than the population, even after accounting for the state's increasing average age, while ambulance responses grew 4.5 per cent faster than the population in the last year of analysis alone, between 2021-22 and 2022-23."

Between 2018-19 and 2022-23, the percentage of ED patients who said that ED staff checked on their condition while they were waiting to be treated improved significantly at NSW-level and across most districts.

However, the percentage of patients who said they 'definitely' felt involved in decisions about their discharge from the ED declined significantly.