Ambulance ramping, waiting times blow out in Tamworth, Gunnedah according to Bureau of Health Information data

Even when patients do get to hospital, one-in-ten is waiting more than an hour to be transferred from the ambulance to the emergency department

The record ramping crisis is despite a dramatic decline in patient presentations to hospitals in the region since last year, according to the latest statistics collated by the Bureau of Health Information (BHI).

Between January and March, just 57.2 per cent of patients at the Tamworth hospital's emergency department (ED) started treatment on time, according to the statistics.

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Ambulance ramping has spiked dramatically in Tamworth, with 10 per cent of patients waiting more than one hour and eight minutes before being transferred into the hospital by paramedics, 12 minutes longer than the same period last year. Just three-quarters of patients were transferred from the ambulance within half-an-hour, down from 94 per cent, five years ago.

Tamworth paramedic and Health Services Union representative, Brian Bridges, spent two-and-a-half hours on the weekend waiting to offload a patient outside Tamworth hospital.

The veteran paramedic said waiting in the bay is "very tiring, very fatiguing".

"We've got to continue monitoring and observations [the whole time]," he said.

"We've got to keep recording their vital signs if there's a change in their trend, we have to re-triage, we may have to re-categorise."

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Health staff recently complained that the hospital had been forced to repeatedly issue 'Code Black' orders to staff to clear a clogged-up system by discharging any patients who could be sent home.

The BHI statistics cover the height of the spread of the Omicron variant, the biggest single infection period during the pandemic.

Mr Bridges said the system had been delayed by the need to test passengers for coronavirus, before taking them into the hospital.

"That could can take anywhere from 15 minutes after your RAT test has been provided," he said.

"If it's positive, we are then held in delay until such time as we go to the ED COVID ward or we go to the COVID isolation room, that's what's driving the delay."

BHI stats show Tamworth hospital was unusually slow-moving compared with the system as a whole from January to March.

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Just 72.3 per cent of patients were delivered from ambulance to emergency department within 30 minutes during the three-month period. The state average for hospitals of a similar size was 78 per cent, and the average across Hunter New England Health was 83.5 per cent.

Hunter New England Health executive Susan Heyman said the service had already improved its processes for coronavirus testing to get things moving again and more recent statistics show a boost in speed.

Ms Heyman wasn't sure why the hospital was unusually poor on the metric.

"I'm not sure what the answer is to that," she said.

"I think there's probably a whole range of factors, from the impact of Omicron, the impact of the facility itself and the physical environment which staff have to operate, the staffing levels. [Health staff] also get sick and have to take unexpected leave which puts pressure on our staffing."

"We're also a rural area. I'm not sure whether all those peer group hospitals are in a rural area. We know that in rural areas, that workforce issues and some of the other issues are greater."

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She praised staff for an extraordinary improvement in elective surgery wait times in the last year, with 96.8 per cent of the 836 surgeries performed during the period being done so on time. Only 40 patients were on the waiting list for an urgent elective surgery at the end of the quarter.

"Our staff have done an amazing job and whilst the data may suggest that it took longer for patients to be offloaded and receive optimum care, the quality of care has been really, really high, as it always has been in our facilities," she said.

"These staff are the same staff that have worked long hours right through the pandemic."

HNELHD Chief Executive, Michael DiRienzo, said the results for the quarter can't be fairly compared to the same period last year due to the impact of the Omicron variant.

"This report reflects an unprecedented period for our health system and I want to thank our staff for their ongoing commitment to providing quality care to their communities," he said.

Gunnedah mayor Jamie Chaffey said the exodus from the town's health services reflected its famously stressed primary healthcare system.

About 70 per cent of locals who filled out a council survey said they had left town to get access to healthcare.

"I'm not shocked that if there are medical treatments that would be required to be provided by a hospital rather than just a GP clinic, that they would be going and presenting elsewhere, based on the fact that a majority of their GP services provided are not coming from GPs based in Gunnedah," he said.

Just 9457 people presented to the Tamworth hospital's ED during the quarter, down 14.2 per cent on the same period the year before.

In Gunnedah, the decline was even more pronounced, down 26.1 per cent to 1663.

Both hospitals were their quietest in five years, in terms of presentations.

Hunter New England Health hospitals treated 103,132 people who presented to an ED during the period, a decline of 5.5 per cent.

The percentage of emergency patients treatment on time at the Tamworth hospital tanked from 72.7 per cent five years ago to 55.5 per cent today, dropping 5.5 per cent in the last year.

Meanwhile, the service continued to see relatively sicker presentations compared with the pre-COVID era, with the average length of stay increasing to 4.9 days for acute care and 25.6 days for non-acute.

255 babies were born at Tamworth hospital in the first quarter of 2022, up 12 on the same period a year before.

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