ED doctor says patients regularly treated in corridors, waiting rooms, ambulance bays

Monday, 27 July 2026

A man says he waited on a stretcher in a corridor at Christchurch Hospital’s Emergency Department for almost six hours without being seen.

A senior emergency doctor says the situation has deteriorated to the point of “substandard dangerous medicine”, with patients regularly left in ambulance bays waiting to be triaged.

Health NZ said there were 471 presentations to ED on Monday last week, well above the June average of 435 a day.

Christchurch man Adrian Shonborn was taken to the ED by ambulance after a car crash on Brougham St in late May.

He was waiting at a red traffic light when he was hit from behind by a vehicle travelling about 60kph. He hit his head, suffered bad whiplash and his car was written off, he said.

Paramedics took him to hospital where he waited almost six hours on a stretcher in an ambulance bay corridor before giving up and leaving.

One nurse took his vitals and another offered to move him to different corridor.

“They said sorry there is no-one available to see me. I waited for probably another 40 minutes and said ‘look I’m going home. If I feel worse or dizzy I’ll come back but if there’s nobody available to see me what’s the point in staying?’”

“There were very sick people around me coughing and vomiting and I would get sicker in there,” he said.

“Something has to be done. The staff can’t do anything and the Government is not doing anything about it.”

Senior emergency doctor Dominic Fleischer said presentations to the department had grown between 4 to 8% a year, more than double Christchurch’s population growth of 0.5 to1% a year.

“If you are funding EDs and hospitals in line with population growth but ED presentations far outstrips population, you have a problem, and we do have a problem,” he said.

Staff had begun to turn beds perpendicular in corridors to fit more in.

“People with minor conditions can wait for hours but we have unwell patients who should be seen waiting for hours in waiting rooms and corridors … Patients and families are very tolerant of it. I fear the result of that.

“You can’t get a patient’s story, you can't do basic things like blood tests in a waiting room or corridor,” he said.

“It’s substandard dangerous medicine.”

Ambulance ramping - where people were waiting in ambulances and ambulance bay corridors to get to triage - was now routine across every emergency department in New Zealand, he said.

“We didn’t ramp during the earthquakes or the mosque attacks but now we do. That’s ominous.”

He said solutions included greater investment in primary healthcare, faster patient flow into hospital wards, and better access to rest home placements.

“People have to stay in hospital because there are no aged care beds, that’s often where the obstruction is.”

He said a triage tent in the hospital car park would be better for patients and Hone Hato St John than people waiting in ambulances.

“There is opposition from management never to let that happen because it would be a bad look.There’s been a big effort to prevent that, but we have been close a couple of times,” he said.

“It should be left up to the clinicians to decide, but it’s become political.”

He expected the winter surge to ease once spring arrives, but warned the system would settle at a new, higher baseline before the next crisis hits.