Kathryn Hailey broke her neck when she bumped into a step while helping to decorate a local church 18 months ago.
"I didn't go up the step — just bumped into it, lost my balance and fell down," she said.
"My head went this way and my body went the other way.
"I heard the noise and I knew. I knew I was seriously injured."
Luckily, Mrs Hailey was not alone in the church at the time and the parish priest called an ambulance for her, but it took nearly an hour to arrive.
She didn't know it yet, but waiting would become a theme of her emergency care.
A 45-minute wait for an ambulance just to be triaged in the corridor
"He rang the ambulance straight away, which took 45 minutes to get here even though he rang twice more to say, 'This woman's really badly hurt,' which was a bit devastating," she said.
Once the ambulance arrived, the paramedics immediately called another crew to help them immobilise her.
The second crew arrived in five minutes.
"I can't figure out why there was such a big discrepancy and why they didn't believe that the injury was as serious as it was," Mrs Hailey said.
"I think it was their administration. [They] didn't realise what was going on."
And she says she wasn't properly immobilised by the paramedics, who put a soft neck brace on her instead of a hard one that would prevent her from turning her head and making her already serious injury worse.
Once she made it to Canberra Hospital, Mrs Hailey thought her waiting would be over due to the seriousness of her injury. She was wrong.
"I was triaged in the corridor, laying on a trolley," Mrs Hailey said.
"They just left me there, basically, for three hours, laying in the corridor. It was in the main corridor with several other people.
"People were passing by. [I'd say], 'I needed assistance,' and I couldn't get anyone to come.
"Finally a cleaner came by and I said, 'Please can you get a nurse? I'm in big trouble,' and so she did, but I probably waited 20 minutes for that."
ACT has nation's worst ED wait times
The annual Report on Government Services shows Mrs Hailey's experience is not unique.
Data from the Productivity Commission shows Australians are spending longer on average in emergency departments (EDs) when they visit, and the ACT times are the worst of all the states and territories.
The ACT had the lowest proportion of people leaving EDs within four hours last financial year, at 52 per cent — down from 57 per cent the year before.
Only 48 per cent of patients were treated within the national benchmark waiting time in 2021-22, the same figure as a year earlier, but down from 61 per cent in 2013-14.
ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith told ABC Radio Canberra the large amount of data from the Productivity Commission allowed the government to look at the system as a whole.
"On the upside, our hospitals are fantastic at seeing really urgent category 1 and 2 patients on time, while the category 2 national average went really backward," she said.
Ms Stephen-Smith said while the data suggested the ACT's hospitals were struggling to keep up, they were faster than comparable hospitals in Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
"When you look at our hospital system, it's not an apples to apples comparison when you compare the ACT to whole jurisdictions," she said.
"We don't have those smaller and regional and outer metropolitan hospitals that are cranking through a lot of the lower urgency [cases] and doing that in a more timely way, and that really skews the data for the ACT."
Despite any explanation of why her wait time was so long, 18 months after her injury Mrs Hailey still feels let down by the system.
She said she hated to complain about the public health system because she believed Canberrans were lucky to have what they did, but her experience in the ED was "not adequate".
"I just think to be in a situation like I was — scared to death with people walking up and down, and you're in the main corridor for goodness sake — it feels demoralising and undignified."
