Hidden Data Reveals Real Cause of ED Crisis

While the daily news cycle has so far seen copy-paste reporting of an Opposition press release regarding Tasmania’s collapsing triage times, a deeper independent analysis of the latest federal health data reveals a far more disturbing reality hiding in the spreadsheets.

The narrative so far focuses on the front door – the fact that only 46 per cent of patients are “seen on time”. While accurate, this statistic is merely a symptom.

The disease itself is “bed block”.

Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) for 2024–25 exposes that Tasmania is the undisputed national leader in the worst possible metric – the time admitted patients wait in the Emergency Department (ED) for a ward bed.

The 24-Hour Wait

Tasmanian Times has taken a deep dive into the data and the AIHW figures show that 90 per cent of patients requiring admission in Tasmania spent up to 23 hours and 40 minutes in the ED before moving to a ward.

To put this in perspective, sick Tasmanians—those ill enough to require hospitalisation—are languishing in emergency waiting rooms or corridors for a full day and night.

This is not just a national trend. Tasmania is a statistical outlier.

The waiting time for a bed here is three hours longer than New South Wales, the next worst-performing state, and nearly 15 hours longer than the Australian Capital Territory.

When admitted patients cannot leave the ED, new patients cannot get in.

This “exit block” is the primary driver of the triage delays at the Royal Hobart Hospital (RHH) and Launceston General Hospital (LGH). Blaming the “front door” staff for triage delays without addressing the “back door” blockage is a failure of analysis.

The lazy narrative that “the whole system is broken” is also contradicted by the raw data.

A granular review of the hospital-level extracts reveals that the crisis is specifically paralysing the state’s major referral centres, while regional hospitals in the North West are performing well above the national average.

At the LGH, only 23 per cent of ‘Urgent’ (Triage 3) patients were seen on time.

Yet at the Mersey Community Hospital in Latrobe, 75 per cent of patients in the same category were seen on time.

The North West Regional Hospital also met the peer group average, seeing 58 per cent of urgent cases on time.

This disparity suggests the issue is not purely a lack of funding or staff statewide, but a specific failure in patient flow and discharge management at the RHH and LGH—complex issues that “more doctors” alone will not solve if there are no beds to put patients in.

In the rush to publish the Opposition’s health crisis media release, the nuance of why the system is failing is often lost.

Shadow Health Minister Sarah Lovell is correct to point out that on-time care has collapsed from 72 per cent to 43 per cent at the LGH since 2016. However, the solution does not lie in simply hiring more triage nurses to stare at a full waiting room.

It requires unlocking the wards.

Tasmanian Times has today prepared a Right to Information (RTI) application with the Department of Health to access internal “access block” reports. We are seeking the specific reasons—be it NDIS discharge delays or closed wards—that explain why a patient in Hobart waits 24 hours for a bed while a patient in Latrobe waits a fraction of that time.

The public deserves more than a “he-said, she-said” over triage percentages.

They deserve to know why, after a decade, the government cannot move patients out of the emergency department.

Media release – Sarah Lovell MLC, Shadow Minister for Health, Mental Health & Wellbeing, 14 December 2025

Tasmania’s emergency departments among the worst in the nation

New data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows Tasmania continues to record some of the poorest emergency department performance results in the country.

The report shows Tasmania is now performing at or near the bottom of the nation across almost every major emergency care metric:

Only 46 per cent of patients are seen on time in EDs – the equal worst result in the country, compared to 67 per cent nationally.

In 2024-25:

Just 47 per cent of emergency patients were seen on time.

• Only 38 per cent of urgent patients commenced treatment within the recommended time.
• Only 52 per cent of semi-urgent patients were seen on time.
• The long-term trends show a system deteriorating further every year:

At the Launceston General Hospital, on-time emergency care has collapsed from 72 per cent in 2016-17 to just 43 per cent in 2024-25.

At the Royal Hobart Hospital, performance has halved, falling from 78 per cent to just 39 per cent over the same period.

These results are not a reflection of Tasmania’s dedicated health workers, who do an extraordinary job every day in impossible circumstances. They reflect a government that has failed to give them the staff, resources and support they need to provide timely, safe, care.

Instead of fixing the crisis, Jeremy Rockliff has chosen to expand his team of highly paid spin doctors to try and skew public perception of his government’s performance.

The message from these statistics is clear: the Premier would be far better off employing real doctors instead of more spin, and Tasmanians cannot trust the Liberals to fix the health system they have allowed to deteriorate for a decade.

Tasmanian Times (TT) is a community-based news and current affairs service covering the island state of Tasmania. It exists to provide a diverse presentation of Tasmanian issues. TT creates and supports independent media content utilising the best of modern technologies and tried-and-true practices of public-interest journalism.

Support us in expanding our coverage and developing new content by and for Tasmanians. 

 New initiatives on the way include … what our contributors and readers suggest! Please get in touch with your suggestions.