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Auckland's four public hospitals are jammed full of patients at levels usually seen only in winter.
And staff are worrying about what will happen in winter - always a busy time for hospitals.
Some patients have had non-urgent surgery postponed and others have had long waits for admission to a hospital ward because of the unseasonable pressure.
More buildings are going up or being expanded in the Government's hospital construction spree, but managers admit they will have trouble finding staff for all the new beds.
Winter is usually the busiest time for hospitals, when cold weather and winter ills such as influenza drive up admissions of patients with heart trouble and respiratory conditions.
Hospital chiefs are at a loss to explain the record-breaking summer. They say the increase is in all types of patients - young and old, medical and injury.
"February has been unbelievably busy," said the Waitemata District Health Board's acting general manager of adult health services, Carol Wilson.
There had been unprecedented demand during summer at the board's emergency care centres in North Shore and Waitakere Hospitals.
Mrs Wilson said she was concerned about how the hospitals would manage as the weather turned cold and admissions increased. "My God, what's winter going to be like?"
The frantic summer follows a winter - and spring - in which some patients were forced to wait on trolleys in corridors at North Shore's emergency centre for 20 hours or more to be admitted to a ward.
The Counties Manukau board's chief medical officer, Don Mackie, said yesterday that Middlemore Hospital was full and had experienced its highest summer occupancy rate. The rush had been going on since December.
Middlemore Hospital's acting general manager for surgery, Alan Wilson, said planning meetings were being held to prepare for the winter influx, and an additional operating theatre, previously a storage space, was being rushed to open in June.
Auckland City Hospital's occupancy has been averaging 93 per cent. Acute admissions to adults' and children's health services in January were the highest for any January in the past five years.
Patient attendances at the hospital's adults emergency department reached 3835, 7 per cent more than in January last year.
At a Waitemata board committee meeting, board chairwoman Kay McKelvie reacted strongly to senior doctors who spoke out last week about an "unacceptable" shortage of resources delaying treatment for many patients until they became acutely unwell.
In a letter to the Herald, she and other board chiefs reiterated the commitment to opening 68 new hospital beds by September, and longer-term plans for 50 more North Shore beds by 2010, more intensive care beds and 212 beds in a new tower block by 2013.
Health Minister David Cunliffe rejected claims of lack of planning, citing the Government's $1.2 billion hospital building programme and employment of 6700 extra nurses and doctors.
Mrs Wilson said "good progress" had been made in recruiting extra staff - especially a net increase of 45 registered nurses since December - but "huge progress" was needed.
"[Recruitment] is a struggle, and is one of the things that might get in the way of fully utilising the [new] beds."
Junior doctors' union secretary Deborah Powell said nearly 20 per cent of the Auckland region's house-officer positions were vacant.
