As another tragic Emergency Department story hits headlines, the latest figures released this week show that emergency department wait times are some of the worst on record, National’s Health spokesperson Dr Shane Reti says.

“When a person goes to an emergency department, it is because they are sick or injured enough to need urgent attention. But under this Labour Government, vulnerable New Zealanders are not getting timely access to the care they desperately need.

“The last National Government implement Better Public Services targets, which included shorter wait times in hospital emergency departments. The targets were one of the first things to go under this Labour Government who could not bear the scrutiny and accountability.

“When National left office in 2017, 91 per cent of patients were being seen within six hours in emergency departments across the country.

“The wait time numbers have been getting worse each year, reaching some of the lowest recorded, with just released data to June 2022 showing only 76 per cent of patients being seen within six hours.

“Even more shocking is the regional breakdown. Canterbury shows a drop to from 93 per cent in 2017 to 79 per cent this year, and Capital and Coast has reached dismal numbers going from a healthy 89 per cent in 2017 to a low of 56 per cent this year.

In 2017, New Zealand Medical Journal found that National’s health targets were making emergency department run more efficiently and found that there were fewer deaths.

“Research from Auckland University in 2016 also showed that targets shortened the length of stays in emergency departments, helped reduce overcrowding and contributed to a 50 per cent reduction in the number of patients deaths.

“Andrew Little is leaving a legacy of emergency department disasters – the recent damning report into the Middlemore hospital tragedy and now another being investigated in Christchurch, likely to be tied yet again to wait times and staff shortages.

“All Labour has to show in their last five years of government is the removal of life saving targets, billions of dollars in extra spending for a bureaucratic health restructure instead of to the front line, and some of the worst health statistics ever recorded. New Zealand deserves better.”