One in three ambulance crews were delayed for longer than 30 minutes at hospital. Over the year these delays totalled 84,680 hours of lost time, up from 78,224 last year and 58,399 the year before. The longer ambulance crews are at hospitals the less time they are available to respond to the next emergency.

The following overview of audits from 2011 found agency restructures significantly impacted agency financial reporting processes, agencies are having difficulty establishing and enforcing compliance with their own policies and procedures, agencies experienced problems complying with regulations and providing adequate documentation to support their financial statements, the poor quality of some financial statements with 1,256 misstatements identified, 540 so significant they had to be corrected, deficiencies in information security exist across many agencies, computer system disaster recovery plans for financial systems not existing or outdated, do not align with agencies’ business recovery requirements, do not properly identify and assess critical systems and processes and testing is incomplete.

This audit follows our earlier studies on ambulance response times, on waiting times for elective (i.e. non-urgent) surgery and on the ‘Code Red’ status of hospital emergency departments. Those audits indicated that matching resources to the ever-increasing numbers of people seeking emergency treatment was certainly an issue, but not the only issue. We found that problems were also occurring at the ‘interface’ between different parts of the health system – when patients arrive in ambulances at emergency departments or when they need to be admitted from emergency departments to hospital wards.

Parliamentary reference - Report number #125 - released 28 July 2004