A Palmerston North emergency department doctor is urging Health New Zealand to "send help" after an extraordinarily busy day.
"It's been kind of a hectic day with the waiting room. I think we have close to 20 to 30 patients," Dr Dusty Bratton told Checkpoint on Friday afternoon.
Bratton was speaking as a member of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS).
Patients had contacted RNZ to say they had been waiting up to 17 hours to be seen at the ED. Bratton said one patient had to wait up to 27 hours.
When he arrived at the hospital in the morning, he found 20 patients with nowhere to be examined. People were even resorting to leaving the ED because of the wait times, he said.
Bratton did not know if this was normal for Palmerston North, having moved to the area a year ago from the US.
He said Kiwis were experiencing longer wait times and more "bedblock", time spent over-capacity than people in the US, which could lead to "bad outcomes" for patients.
"It doesn't seem to flow quite as well."
Staff were picking up extra shifts to help combat the wait times, but that was not sustainable, he said.
Healthcare workers have taken to protesting in recent years as hospitals struggle to cope with demand. Kim Baker Wilson / RNZ
"[Staff are] just trying to help out as much as they can. They're staying late, coming in early."
He had personally worked an extra three shifts in two weeks.
Bratton doubted Palmerston North would be able to reach the government's target of seeing 95 percent of patients within six hours.
"The number of patients we have are greater than the number of spaces we have."
The ED needed more beds and space to admit and see patients, he said.
There was pressure to reach discharge targets and make numbers look better on paper, but Bratton did not know if that always resulted in decisions that were in the patients' best interests.
In the last month, Palmerston North Hospital has added an extra 14 beds and an assessment room to the department.
Bratton said this had not solved "bedblock" issues, however.
Asked what his message was to Health NZ, he replied: "Send help - that's all I got."
Health NZ group director of operations at Counties Manukau Dr Vanessa Thornton admitted they were "going to have to put our thinking caps on and do more" in response to wait times during flu season.
"We are starting to think about what we're going to do next year already with respect to this," she told Checkpoint.
"I think it's a really challenging time and the staff are doing a great job.
"Just this week compared to last week we've had 1500 more presentations to EDs across the country, and most of that is related to viral load and flu, particularly influenza A," she said.
Dr Vanessa Thornton RNZ / Dan Cook
Palmerston North Hospital was one of many struggling with "unprecedented demand" due to winter illness, she said. Even her own hospital, Middlemore Hospital, had seen patients facing eight-hour waits on Friday morning.
Most hospitals were not close to the current target of 95 per cent of people being seen within six hours, she said.
She wanted to reassure the public that they would not be sent home early to help meet that target.
"All patients that are urgently needing critical care are seen as a priority, but some will wait longer to be seen for treatment," she said.
The public needed to get on board with things like vaccinations, early treatment of illnesses and more to help manage hospital wait times in the future, she said.
-RNZ