Doctors Allege Cover-Up as NSW Hospitals Hit Record 500,000 Admissions

As hospitals struggle to cope with an influx of patients, doctors claim alarming health statistics are being ‘buried’ in government reports.

A New South Wales ambulance paramedic transports a suspected COVID-19 patient to the Emergency Department of St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia on June 4, 2020. Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Hospitals in New South Wales (NSW) are struggling to cope with a record number of patients, while doctors claim that data indicating the system is in crisis is being hidden in government reports.

The number of people admitted to the state’s hospitals has hit record levels of more than 515,000 in the quarter from April to June 2025, according to the latest Healthcare Quarterly report by the Bureau of Health Information.

Nearly 65,000 elective surgeries were performed, the most in any quarter since the bureau began reporting in 2010.

But while numbers are up, wait times are down. The number of patients who, at the end of June, had waited longer than clinically recommended for their surgery dropped to 2,534—down from 8,588 at the end of March this year.

However, the Australian Medical Association says that doesn’t paint an accurate picture and that signs the health system is under stress are being buried in other reports.

The organisation’s state president, Dr. Kathryn Austin, questioned the bureau’s presentation of data.

For instance, only 66.1 percent of non-urgent surgeries—which should be completed within a year—were performed on time, marking a sharp decline from 82.4 percent in the same quarter in 2024.

“Hiding these results does not make the problem go away; it only undermines confidence in the system and makes it harder to drive necessary change,” Austin said.

The association said one in 10 patients spent more than 13 hours and six minutes in the emergency department at urban hospitals, a trend it said was unacceptable.

No Obfuscation, Bureau Says

But the Bureau said it applied the same criteria of “objectivity, fairness, and meaningfulness” when highlighting key findings each quarter, regardless of the nature of the results.

“The decrease in the percentage of [non-urgent] elective surgeries performed on time ... is a direct result of the large number of patients who had been overdue [having received] their surgery during the quarter,” a bureau spokesperson told AAP.

“Surgery waiting time information remains available in the key findings, along with graphs clearly presenting waiting times and the percentage of surgeries performed on time.”

NSW Health Minister Ryan Park said even though hospitals continued to experience high demand, the government was working on relieving pressure.

“We’re investing in more staff, more hospitals and more beds, more quickly, and we’re seeing lower wait times and less ramping,” he said.

“While lower ED wait times and ramping are promising, there is still more to be done.”

He attributed the wait-time reduction to a recruitment drive of nearly 3,000 full-time health workers, staff retention rates returning to pre-pandemic levels, and an increased uptake of urgent and virtual care health services.

The state’s emergency departments had 785,084 attendances from April to June this year, a slight drop of 1.3 percent from the same quarter last year.

“Fewer patients with less-urgent conditions presented to EDs. However, there were record numbers of patients presenting with more serious conditions,” Bureau of Health Information acting Chief Executive Hilary Rowell said.

The report notes that nearly 80 percent of patients who arrived by ambulance were transferred to ED staff within 30 minutes—up 5.6 percentage points compared with the same time in 2024.

AAP contributed to this story.