The number of people presenting at John Hunter Hospital's emergency department for treatment required within 10 minutes has almost doubled in a decade, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).
AIHW released the data on Wednesday in its latest update of the "My Hospitals" series.
It showed that John Hunter Hospital had 13,358 presentations to emergency in the 10-minute treatment category in 2021-22, rising from 7007 in 2012-13.
The number of patients presenting at John Hunter's emergency department for "urgent" treatment, required within 30 minutes, rose from 20,284 in 2011-12 to 28,968 in 2021-22.
Hunter New England Health declined to comment on any of the data.
Australian Medical Association [AMA] NSW president Dr Michael Bonning said "there has been growing pressure on emergency departments in the Hunter".
"But what you see in this data is the capacity of the hospital system to see emergency patients that need to be seen within 10 minutes has actually improved over time," Dr Bonning said.
"That shows superhuman efforts of the teams on the ground and better processes for identifying and treating patients."
He said emergency medical care had developed as a specialty over the last decade.
Dr Bonning noted that emergency department presentations in the 10-minute category at Hunter New England hospitals had risen from 45,823 to 54,340 in "the space of three years".
"Even at a time when there's been increasing pressure on the system, including from COVID, we've still gotten better at making sure those patients get seen."
He said people with a lower socio-economic status were "more likely to visit the emergency department for the non-urgent and semi-urgent categories".
"Those categories in the Hunter have stayed pretty stable," he said, despite the decline in bulk billing and the shortage of GPs.
"But people with deteriorating clinical problems are becoming more frequent in hospitals.
"With that, you also get more people ending up on your elective surgery waitlists."
He said the median time spent in Hunter hospitals "creeping up from 2.5 to almost 3 hours over three years is important".
"That's patients who are blocked in the system. We know what they need and where they need to go, but they're stuck waiting for care."
Dr Bonning said he was in Newcastle last month "speaking to a couple of the emergency physicians".
"That's one of the things they talked about - this idea of when the hospital is blocked up.
"Whether they're at Maitland or John Hunter, they're often keeping an eye on patients for the team that would otherwise admit them to a ward.
"If they were on the wards, they'd have their own nurses and medical team, but for the time being they might be stuck in emergency for up to eight hours."
In NSW, there are three categories of elective surgery: non-urgent [treatment required within 365 days], semi-urgent [90 days] and urgent [30 days].
Dr Bonning said the median time for elective surgery across the Hunter "bumped up during COVID as expected, but has come back to what we would expect".
"Urgent elective surgery pre-COVID was 11 days and post-2022 it was 11 days. Semi-urgent surgery, at 42 days, is now back below pre-COVID times."
The median time for non-urgent surgery in Hunter hospitals was about 231 days in 2021-22, down from 289 days the previous year.
AMA NSW had called before the March state election for the number of patients waiting for elective surgery to be reduced.
The Minns government announced the NSW Surgical Care Taskforce in March to tackle the waiting list.
"We know from talking to the taskforce that they are making real progress across the state in bringing down the long waitlist - those patients waiting longer than clinically appropriate," Dr Bonning said.
To see more stories and read today's paper download the Newcastle Herald news app here.
