Wait times for non-urgent surgery at John Hunter Hospital have blown out by four months, and the typical patient is waiting almost a year to go under the knife.
The latest Bureau of Health Information report issued on Wednesday shows non-urgent elective surgery waiting times at the hospital rose from a median of 198 days to 325 days in the final quarter of 2020.
The 127-day increase placed the John Hunter well above the 284-day median wait time for non-urgent surgery at similar "peer-group" hospitals in the state.
The number of such operations occurring in the clinically recommended time plummeted from 97.5 per cent to 61 per cent, well below the 71 per cent performed at peer-group hospitals.
One in 10 non-urgent surgery patients waited more than 474 days, up from 359 days the year before.
John Hunter Hospital general manager Leanne Johnson said the longer wait times were due to a 6.58 per cent increase in unplanned, acute surgery compared with the 2019 December quarter.
"We saw an unprecedented number of emergency cases requiring surgery, so when we see the emergency cases go up we don't have the same capacity to get through the elective cases," she said.
"Post-COVID we're doing everything we can do to get ahead and to make sure people who are on the wait list are being seen as quickly as possible."
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Emergency presentations increased 4.5 per cent year-on-year, but hospital admissions from the emergency department fell 0.7 per cent.
Dr Johnson said elective patients had suffered a "double whammy" with COVID-related shutdowns and the spike in emergency surgery.
She hoped to reduce waiting times this year by working with private and public hospitals in the area.
Asked if the government had given the hospital more resources to cope with the problem, Dr Johnson said: "We've been given direction to do what's needed.
"We have put on some additional resources in terms of doctors and nurses, but predominantly it's the workforce we have already working additional hours."
NSW Nurses and Midwives' Association general secretary Brett Holmes said John Hunter nursing staff were "under pressure" to deliver safe patient care but were being "hampered by understaffing".
"We're continuing our fight for shift-by-shift ratios to be introduced across our public hospitals, including a ratio of 1:3 in EDs," he said.
"It's time Hunter New England Health valued and resourced nurses through shift-by-shift ratios and an adequate skills mix."
The typical wait for semi-urgent surgery grew from 43 days to 57 at the John Hunter, above the 48-day peer-group average, and stayed stable at nine days for urgent elective procedures.
The hospital performed 2238 elective surgeries from October to December, a rise of 5.5 per cent from the corresponding period in 2019.
It performed 77 more urgent and semi-urgent operations but 259 fewer non-urgent surgeries than in the last quarter of the previous year.
Almost all urgent patients, 99.9 per cent, had their operations within the recommended period, but the number of semi-urgent operations performed on time fell from 99.7 to 79.4 per cent.
The number of John Hunter patients on the waiting list and ready for elective surgery fell 6.4 per cent to 2654 at the end of December.
Maitland Hospital non-urgent surgery waiting times increased by 108 days to 346 days, and the median wait for semi-urgent surgery jumped from 41 to 68 days.
Across NSW, 5950 patients on the list had waited longer than the clinically recommended time, compared with 1144 on the final day of 2019.
The typical wait time for non-urgent operations was up 83 days across the state to 320.
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