Ambulances carrying patients from the northern edge of Auckland have been driving them to Whangārei Hospital instead of North Shore Hospital, because the Auckland hospital has been too full to take them.
RNZ reported the diversions on 13 August, saying they were happening on Tuesday night and had also occurred the week before. The patients being moved are from the northern part of the Rodney district, the strip of countryside and small towns that runs from Wellsford up to the Northland boundary and would normally be served by North Shore.
Tim Malloy, a GP with the Coast to Coast Health Care group in Wellsford, told RNZ he had been sent a letter by St John Ambulance the previous week telling him that any of his patients who needed an emergency department would now be taken north to Whangārei. The letter said the change was “due to the huge demand on the services at North Shore Hospital”, he said. It was the first such letter his practice had ever received.
Whangārei Hospital is roughly half the size of North Shore and has been running hard all winter itself. RNZ understood that Tuesday night, when the diversions took place, was also a very busy one in the Whangārei emergency department.
Health New Zealand played the practice down. Its director of operations, Brad Healy, said a “very small number” of ambulances had actually gone to Whangārei.
“This practice is not unusual and used at times to manage demand and ensure patients can receive care as quickly as possible. In some instances, depending on the location of the patient, Whangārei Hospital is closer in travel time than North Shore Hospital,” Healy said.
That last point is fair as far as it goes. Wellsford sits close to the midpoint between the two hospitals, about an hour’s drive from each on a clear run, and for a patient picked up further north again, near Te Hana or Mangawhai, Whangārei is plainly the shorter trip. What has changed is that the choice is no longer being made purely on distance. A letter warning GPs to expect their patients to be sent in the opposite direction is a signal about capacity, not geography.
Malloy said this had been the busiest winter he had seen in 37 years as a GP. Patients at the Coast to Coast urgent care clinic were sometimes waiting five hours to be seen, and staff had been called in on their days off to cope.
“When you have 15 people waiting for you and you have a serious illness you are trying to manage in a patient while you wait for an ambulance to arrive, and all these patients are just having to wait, it’s incredibly stressful. For all of us,” he said.
Most of the people turning up were carrying respiratory infections, he said. The cases seemed to be lasting longer than usual, secondary infections were becoming more common, and influenza numbers were high enough that it was “hammering all our communities”. Illness was not confined to the usual vulnerable groups either, with otherwise healthy adults getting properly sick.
From a patient’s point of view, Malloy told RNZ’s Morning Report, the direction the ambulance turns is “slightly academic”. People were simply grateful to be picked up at all.
His suggested fix was upstream of the hospital doors. Malloy wants a campaign encouraging people to get a flu vaccination, and he wants those vaccinations to be free for everyone rather than for a defined list of groups.
“The burden on our hospital EDs in particular is ridiculous and we need to be doing everything we possibly can do as a whole society and as health providers to prevent that from happening,” he said.
At the moment the flu vaccine is funded by Pharmac for everyone aged 65 and over, for pregnant women, and for people from six months of age who have a qualifying medical condition such as asthma, diabetes or a heart condition. Young children who have been in hospital with a respiratory illness also qualify. Everyone else pays, usually somewhere between $25 and $45. Pharmac has proposed widening the criteria to cover all children aged six months to five years, which would add roughly 260,000 children and would take effect from the start of the 2027 flu season on 1 April 2027 if it goes ahead.
The national surveillance numbers are less dramatic than the view from a Wellsford waiting room. PHF Science, the public health agency formerly known as ESR, recorded influenza and RSV as the most commonly detected viruses in the week ending 2 August, with both influenza A/H1 and A/H3 showing up in GP and hospital testing. The influenza share of severe respiratory hospitalisations had risen but was still inside the low seasonal activity band, and the overall rate of severe respiratory hospitalisations in the Auckland region had fallen for a third week in a row.
That gap between the data and the experience is the part worth paying attention to. A hospital does not have to face a record flu season to run out of room. It only has to be running close to full before winter starts, which is the position most of the larger New Zealand hospitals have been in for several years now.
Health New Zealand went into this winter with a $25 million plan built around moving patients through emergency departments faster, and by July it had lifted its temporary extra bed count to 103 beds nationally, up from the 71 announced in March. None of those were in Northland or on the North Shore. The Government’s health target asks hospitals to admit, discharge or transfer 95 percent of emergency department patients within six hours.
Whangārei Hospital is due for a much larger emergency department eventually. The first stage of its redevelopment, funded at $759 million in November 2022, includes an acute services building with an emergency department about three times the current size. Construction is staged over years, and the ambulances are being redirected now.
Have you or a family member been taken to a hospital further away than you expected this winter, or waited longer than you thought reasonable at an urgent care clinic? Tell us what happened 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 🙂
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