KEY POINTS:
Surgery and emergency waiting times at Auckland hospitals are among the worst in the country, according to a new report.
It also reveals that at least four district health boards are failing health ministry guidelines for patients needing immediate care, while only eight hit benchmarks for people requiring the second most urgent level of care - needing to be seen by a doctor within 10 minutes of admission.
Just three - Tairawhiti, Wairarapa and South Canterbury - make the grade for seeing the patients in the third most urgent category, within 30 minutes of admission.
The quarterly Hospital Benchmark Information survey ranked 21 boards throughout New Zealand in categories such as emergency responses to life-threatening cases, patient satisfaction and staff turnover.
Carried out between October and December last year, it supports a recent Commonwealth health study study of seven countries that found New Zealand had the worst waiting times for elective surgery and hospital care, with 85 per cent of doctors here reporting that there were often long waits for those services, compared with 69 per cent in Australia and 62 per cent inBritain.
Auckland rates the worst for keeping patients waiting for surgery - with only 28.5 per cent of inpatient surgery carried out on the day of admission.
It also fares badly in triage waiting times with only 60 per cent of second-level emergency care patients and 50 per cent of the third most severe cases seen in the recommended time - national benchmarks are 80 and 75 per cent respectively - and rates below the national average for patient satisfaction.
Top marks in the category went to Nelson Marlborough, followed by West Coast.
Acute re-admissions and re-admissions within a week of discharge were highest in the Lakes, Waitemata and Whanganui districts.
Earlier this year National Party health spokesman Tony Ryall described the poor response times as a "major problem" .
"Many hospitals struggle to even see patients with immediate or imminent threat to life or limb. How bad is that?" he asked.
However, Auckland District Health Board boss Wayne Brown rejected the findings, saying that they were "rubbish" and "grossly out of date".
Auckland had carried out 12 per cent more elective surgery in the past year than it had ever done previously, and was meeting every elective surgery performance indicator. "The results at Auckland are fantastic at the moment. We're running our first surpluses for many years, and we're overproducing our hip replacement [quota] at the moment. It's a good news story."
Healthy and Ailing
Healthy places: Nelson and Marlborough, Wairarapa, Tairawhiti.
Ailing places: Whanganui, Waitemata, Canterbury.
