Health NZ says Christchurch is experiencing some of the highest levels of demand seen in recent years, as are hospitals around the country.
It said additional spaces may be used, like corridors, to care for patients but corridors aren’t always used this way.
However, senior ED doctor Dominic Fleischer said having patients in corridors was now routine.
“It is absolutely the norm to have patients in corridors and patients in corridors for hours overnight. [On] Tuesday, I had patients who’d been in the corridors for verging on 24 hours, and not one, not two, but several.”
Fleischer said these were often people who needed to be admitted to hospital, but there were simply no beds in the wards.
“And so they stay in the corridors where they get absolutely substandard care.
“You can’t talk to a patient in the corridor because it’s noisy, it’s not private. So you can’t get a good history from a patient. You can’t examine them like you could in a private cubicle. You can’t do basic tests. You can’t monitor them,” he added.
NZ Nurses Organisation delegate Al Dietschin echoed this, saying patients could not be cared for with dignity in corridors.
He added it was clear that people were self-discharging more, after having to wait 12 or more hours in the ED.
“But it’s also happening throughout the hospital, especially in surgical wards from time to time, people get bumped off waiting lists for surgery.”
Dietschin said employing more staff would no doubt help the problem, but substantial workforce or infrastructure planning was also required.
“We see an ageing population that’s becoming more acutely unwell, but we haven’t looked 20 years, 50 years ahead and sort of gone, ‘Well, this is where we’re going to be.’”
Health NZ’s Canterbury operations director, Hamish Brown, said it recognised that receiving care in the corridor was not an experience wanted for patients, and wasn’t an environment staff wanted to be providing care in.
He added that preparations had been underway since March to improve hospital flow, and enable patients to return home sooner.
“Specifically in Christchurch we have funded three general practices … to provide additional evening and weekend urgent care clinics, provided an additional 750 urgent care telehealth vouchers for people presenting to Christchurch ED during the winter months, [and] employed additional clinical staff across key areas.”
Fleischer said a new after-hours clinic in Rolleston had been a “huge help” but the rest were small changes.
“We know this time next year we’ll be in an even worse position than we are this time. And so it’d be nice to have some co-ordinated planning to try and make that not happen,” he said.
“The changes have to be monumental. We can’t be talking about small tinkering around the edges. The department needs more doctors, more nurses, more beds.”
Jaime Cunningham is a Christchurch-based reporter with a focus on education and general news. She joined Newstalk ZB in 2023 after working as a sports reporter at the Christchurch Star.