22-07-2025
Aussie woman's horror 25 hours in an emergency department waiting room exposes the huge problem with our healthcare system
A young woman has documented the 25 hours she spent by her ailing mother's side as she desperately waited for a bed in a Sydney emergency department.
Ella Jae, 22, shared a video of her time in the waiting room of Westmead Hospital, in Sydney's west, to social media last week.
She said her mother, who was suffering health problems after having an abscess removed, and elderly patients were forced to endure an entire day and 'freezing' night in the hospital before being given a bed.
She started filming about four hours into her wait, at 10pm.
'The amount of people in this waiting room is absolutely crazy,' she said while sitting outside the hospital, rugged up in a hoodie and tracksuit pants.
'I feel terrible for all of them because there are people that have been waiting for 12 hours.'
It would be another 21 hours before her mother was given somewhere to lie down, after an entire night and day of agony.
'I've never had an experience like this before,' Ms Jae said at the 22-hour mark.
'Pretty devastated at the Australian government right now.'
Ms Jae shared various updates throughout the night, such as at the 1.30am mark where she had to renew her parking, and said her mum was given some pain relief.
She provided another update at 2.30am and one at 4.30am, wrapped in blankets, where she said her mother was finally seen by a doctor but had to return to the waiting room.
More hourly updates were given until her mother was finally taken in, more than a day later.
The video casts doubt over efforts to tackle the state's overstretched public hospital system, including a recent $900million redevelopment of Westmead.
Half the emergency patients at Westmead waited at least 6.5 hours in July to September last year, the longest in the state, according to hospital data.
The problem is even more pronounced in mental health emergency care, with one schizoaffective patient reportedly waiting 93 hours for a bed at the hospital in April.
He was forced to wait alongside two other men - one with paranoid ideation and another with schizophrenia - who reportedly waited 88 hours and 86 hours for beds.
Their stories were the subject of a June expose by the ABC's Four Corners program.
It comes after distressing images emerged of elderly patients lying on the floor of Blacktown Hospital, some waiting hours while in pain.
Among them was Raymond, a 70-year-old man, who presented to the western Sydney hospital's waiting room on Saturday with severe diarrhoea and life-threatening haemoglobin levels.
Despite his condition, he spent more than 24 hours waiting for a bed - much of it trying to sleep on the cold, hard vinyl floor of the waiting room in excruciating pain.
His daughter Hayley took a photo of him during the agonising wait and shared it with 2GB Breakfast host Ben Fordham.
She also shared a photo of another elderly man, 80, sleeping on the floor, wrapped in a blanket. The man had already been waiting for a bed for at least 12 hours.
'No one wants to see the elderly suffer in pain like this,' she said.
The images indicate little has been done in the ten months since Premier Chris Minns singled out Blacktown as he vowed to improve the state's public health system.
'We'll have to look at Blacktown in particular - there's major stress on our public hospitals,' Minns said last September.
'We want to do better when it comes to health outcomes.'
