Te Whatu Ora Northern acting deputy chief executive Vanessa Thornton. Photo: RNZ / Dan Cook
Auckland's public hospitals are at the "upper limit" of their capacity as winter illnesses hit hard.
Ambulances were delayed off-loading patients at Auckland City and Middlemore hospitals on Monday, and all four of the city's public hospitals were under pressure
The acting deputy chief executive of Te Whatu Ora Northern, Vanessa Thornton, said hospitals are very full and many people are turning up to emergency departments with respiratory illnesses.
"Coughs, colds, pnemonias, flu - influenza A and B, these are the things that are ... increasing the number of presentations at this time of year," she said.
Monday was very busy - Mondays often are - but not the busiest this winter, she said.
Even though ambulance patients were delayed at Middlemore and Auckland, the hospitals did not need to escalate to emergency reponse mode where ambulances might take patients to other hospitals to reduce the load, she said.
That had happened at times in the past few weeks, Thornton said.
When wards were very full with sick people, the pressure mounted on emergency departments because it was harder to move people out and admit them to a hospital bed.
"At this time of the year we are always generally full at the acute services - medicine, surgery, orthopaedics, they're all very full," she said.
"Our capacity is at its upper limit but we have got some escalation capacity which some of the hospitals have needed to employ to ensure flow."
Hato Hone St John Ambulance Auckland operations manager Andy Everiss said the service worked with the hospitals to manage demand yesterday, including taking patients to non-hospital clinics where appropriate.
It was working to ensure those who needed time-critical care got it without delay, he said.
Thornton, who is an ED doctor herself, said patients should not hesitate to come to hospital if they needed emergency care at any time of the day or night.
Those who needed urgent care would be seen urgently, she said.
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