The Minister of Health, David Cunliffe said all emergency department patients with an urgent life-threatening condition are getting immediate treatment.

 Commenting on the latest Hospital Benchmark Information (HBI) reports the Minister said “this was great news as our Hospitals were not only achieving immediate treatment for very urgent cases but were performing well for the next level of seriously ill or injured patients”.

 “The Accident and Emergency departments were tracked in the three months to March, and we are performing well with the next most urgent patients. Auckland, Canterbury and Counties Manukau District Health Boards have increased the speed with which they treat triage 2, or semi urgent patients.”

 "This is also heartening as these DHBs have some of our largest and busiest emergency departments. They have all been working hard to improve the efficiency of their services recently and this work is seeing results for patients."

 These benchmark reports are produced quarterly and track New Zealand’s public hospitals against 15 performance measures

 The report measures hospital’s performances against one another and looks for ways to improve that performance. Among the performance measures are triage times (emergency department waiting times), patient satisfaction, average length of stay and acute readmissions.

Nationwide, overall patient satisfaction remains high at 87.3 percent.