Patients arriving at Wellington Hospital’s emergency department have waited more than 24 hours to be seen this month, according to internal Health New Zealand documents and a nurse who works there.
RNZ health reporter Ellen O’Dwyer reported on Sunday morning that the agency’s own paperwork recorded some patients exceeding 24 hours in the department in early August, with large numbers waiting more than six hours because there were no medical beds to move them into. The nurse, a New Zealand Nurses Organisation delegate who was not named because she feared repercussions for speaking publicly, described an overnight shift on Monday 17 August in which the hospital escalated to Code Red several times.
One man arrived in the evening and was not admitted until about 6am. He was only moved through, the nurse said, after he fell asleep in the waiting area and hit his head.
“The only reason he was brought through then was because of him falling asleep and face-planting, and they were checking him for any injuries,” she told RNZ.
Code Red is Health NZ’s internal signal that an emergency department is under severe strain. It is set by looking at how congested the waiting room is, the mix of staff on duty, changes in the hours of care needed and how sick the people waiting are. A shift report written by a staff member that night said the department was operating under “extreme pressure” and experiencing “significant and sustained over-crowding”.
The nurse said the hospital was full and bed-blocked, with at least 11 patients being treated in corridors, which she described as normal rather than exceptional. On other days there could be as many as 24 people in corridors.
“It’s just a sh**show to work in at the moment. Lots of pressure,” she said. “We’re getting high presentations, but the pressure’s coming from where we can’t get patients off to wards to free up our ED space, so that we can continue to see the new ones coming in.”
“It’s awful, you know, and every day you’re seeing your corridors full and we’re all walking past these corridors,” she said. “There’s no privacy for any of these patients.”
Health NZ told RNZ there were 27.1 full-time nurse vacancies in the Wellington emergency department. Eighteen new nurses are due to start in the coming months, which would leave 8.8 full-time positions still being recruited.
Michelle Sutherland, the agency’s interim group director of operations for the region, said 212 people came through the emergency department on 17 August after several days of high demand, and that 66 per cent of them were discharged within six hours. Winter is the busiest stretch of the year for hospitals and more patients were expected.
“We acknowledge that a number of patients experienced very long waits,” Sutherland said. “The longest waits tend to reflect particularly complex circumstances, rather than the experience of most people in the department.”
The wider numbers make it hard to treat one bad Monday as an outlier. Every hospital in the country is measured against a target that 95 per cent of emergency patients are admitted, discharged or transferred within six hours. Health NZ’s own health targets factsheet for January to March 2026 shows Capital and Coast, the district that runs Wellington Regional Hospital, met that target 57.6 per cent of the time.
That is the lowest result of any of the 20 districts in the country. The national figure for the same three months was 74.4 per cent. MidCentral was next worst on 59.2 per cent, Waikato managed 66.5 per cent, and at the other end of the table West Coast hit 95.6 per cent, South Canterbury 91.8 per cent and TairΔwhiti 91.3 per cent. The Central region, which takes in Wellington, Hutt Valley, Wairarapa, MidCentral, Whanganui, Taranaki and Hawke’s Bay, was the weakest of the four regions at 67.3 per cent.
Capital and Coast handled 14,850 emergency attendances in that quarter, up 2 per cent on the same period a year earlier. Nationally, attendances were almost exactly flat, at 333,104 compared with 333,642. In other words the volume of people turning up has barely moved, and the problem sits further inside the building, in the wards that emergency staff cannot move people into.
Health Minister Simeon Brown said the situation at Wellington was not acceptable.
“It continues to be one of the lowest-performing in the country, and that is not good enough for patients or for staff,” Brown told RNZ. “Our doctors, nurses and healthcare workers work incredibly hard every day, but they are operating in a facility that does not support safe patient flow or timely treatment.”
Brown said wait times at the hospital had improved under the current government, with the six-hour figure rising from 43.8 per cent in 2023 to 57.6 per cent now, and Code Red events falling from 729 in 2023 to 567 in 2025. His office said extra beds had been provided as part of winter planning. A redevelopment of the emergency department has been prioritised in the Health Infrastructure Plan, but space at the hospital has been a problem for years and the rebuild is not likely to be finished until 2029.
“However, there is still a long way to go before Wellingtonians can access emergency care as quickly as they deserve,” Brown said.
Nationally, emergency departments have been close to standing still. When Brown released the January to March figures in June he said progress was continuing across all five government health targets, and the emergency result did improve, by 0.2 percentage points on the same quarter a year earlier. That leaves it 2.6 points short of the 77 per cent milestone the health system set itself for the 2025-26 year, and more than 20 points short of the 95 per cent target it is meant to reach by 2030.
Health NZ says a targeted programme to improve emergency performance is under way, with 76 of 79 planned initiatives now in place, including new flow manager roles, a surgical assessment unit in Dunedin and fast-track models of care at the front door of several hospitals. None of that changes what a Wellington patient sees on a bad night, which is a corridor bed, no curtain and a wait measured in shifts rather than hours.
Health is one of the few areas where New Zealanders reliably agree they want more, not less. A survey published this month found more than nine in ten people want more spent on cancer care, and most said they would pay for it themselves.
Have you waited in an emergency department this winter, in Wellington or anywhere else in the country. Tell us what the wait was like in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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