A patient with chest pains had to wait more than two hours for an ambulance from Rutherford while a stroke patient had to wait the same length of time for an ambulance from Kurri Kurri, according to response times released by the NSW opposition.
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In another case, a patient waited five hours to be treated by paramedics from Dungog.
Opposition health spokesman Andrew McDonald said ambulance delays would worsen with the O’Farrell government’s $3 billion cut to the health system.
Documents obtained by the opposition under freedom of information laws revealed that in 2011 and 2012 there were 279 priority one cases where patients were forced to wait more than five hours for an ambulance to arrive, despite the person needing immediate medical assistance.
Among these cases were people who were unconscious and had problems breathing, people with heart problems and chest pains, and trauma cases.
The documents revealed workloads were listed as the second-most common reason for the blow out in response times in the 50 longest priority one cases.
Dr McDonald said one in three ambulances was delayed by more than 30 minutes at a hospital emergency department last year.
The average off-stretcher time, which measures the time to offload ambulance patients into the emergency department, has risen from 24.4 to 31.6 minutes over the past seven years, an auditor-general’s report revealed.
It said 61 of 89 hospitals performed worse, with patients not being offloaded within the recommended 30 minutes.
“The minister needs to reverse the $3 billion worth of cuts, otherwise health workers will continue to be under immense pressure and patient care will suffer,” Dr McDonald said.
Meanwhile, Health Minister Jillian Skinner said the auditor-general’s report showed 83 per cent of ambulance patients were transferred into a hospital’s care within the target 30 minutes between April last year and February this year.
But this fell short of the 90 per cent target required by NSW Health.
“NSW Health has put in place initiatives to reduce waiting times for ambulance crews at hospitals,” Mrs Skinner said.
The report showed ambulance arrivals had increased more than four times the population growth in recent years and while some hospitals showed improvements in meeting targets a great improvement is needed statewide.
