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A woman at risk of having a stroke says she waited for more than 24 hours before seeing a doctor at North Shore Hospital - and was then diagnosed with cancer.
The woman was told by her GP to go straight to hospital after test results revealed her blood-clot levels were five times the normal limit, putting her at serious risk of having a stroke.
The mother of two left work immediately and went to the hospital at 3pm last Wednesday, but family friend and former MP Owen Jennings said she was not given a ward bed until 5pm Thursday - after sitting in a waiting room for 26 hours.
Distressed and scared, the woman was told there was no telling when a bed would become free, but she should not leave, or she would lose her place in the queue. After being admitted to a ward, scans and x-rays revealed her illness was caused by lymphoma cancer.
Jennings wrote a letter to the Herald on Sunday outlining the woman's plight and criticising North Shore Hospital for the delay in treatment, comparing the health care to a Third World country.
The former Act MP and head of Federated Farmers immediately flew to Auckland after receiving an agitated phone call from the woman, who was scared that she would have a stroke while sitting in the hospital.
"She called and said: 'I need help. I am scared. I could have a stroke at any time. Nobody here is telling me what is going on. What can I do?"'
Rachel Haggerty, general manager of adult health services at Waitemata District Health Board, said she was confident that the woman did not wait 26 hours before being given a bed.
Haggerty said the woman was referred to the emergency care centre at 5.30pm on Wednesday, was medically assessed eight hours later and waited for a bed for another six hours, once staff decided to admit her, but did not say how long she had waited.
"The wait is not desirable but does occur when we are very busy."
The hospital's emergency department and acute medical admission ward were in the same building, Haggerty said.
All medical observation is completed in the ECC area, and patients can wait there for 24 hours before being moved into a ward.
"The Emergency Care Centre is a very safe place for a patient to be, as they have excellent staff and monitoring equipment to handle the sickest and most at-risk patients," she said.
Jennings said the hospital's response was "bunkum", as the woman's release report, obtained by the Herald on Sunday, showed she was admitted at 12.13am Thursday - 17 hours before Jennings watched her being admitted later that day.
A dozen other patients were also waiting with serious conditions, and while staff were sympathetic, Jennings said, management was "happy" to let frontline staff absorb the pressure.
Staff told him they were doing their best in a crisis caused by winter ills and influenza.
The woman now needs a biopsy to determine the precise nature of the lymphoma and how far it has spread. She needs more scans before radiation and chemotherapy start, urgent treatment delayed until next week because of a backlog of patients.
As a foreign-aid worker, Jennings has visited hospitals in Africa, India, Nepal and Thailand and says he has never seen people treated so poorly.
He understood that health services were stretched in winter but said hospitals should be able to plan ahead.
"I fear for what might happen in a large emergency needing many services - ambulances, nurses, doctors, beds - it doesn't bear thinking about."
Dr Jonathan Coleman, MP for Northcote and a former GP, has raised concerns about the hospital before and said waiting 26 hours was "completely unacceptable".
At a glance
* Winter ills mean that beds are full, and sick patients are waiting in beds in corridors.
* North Shore Hospital is short of 60 full-time nurses.
* The Waitemata District Health Board is the most underfunded DHB in the country, receiving 14.1 per cent less per person on average, a shortfall of between $90 million and$100 million.
* Migration has made the DHB one of the fastest growing in the country.
* Waitemata scored worst in a national performance review for triage-1 care (the most urgent) at 77 per cent of cases. Auckland and Counties Manukau scored 100 per cent.
- Jared.savage@heraldonsunday.co.nz
