Will bigger emergency departments cut Victoria's hospital waits?

Updated 3 November 2026 with the latest figures.

At Ballarat Base Hospital, an emergency doctor the ABC called David says waits of more than 40 hours for a ward bed are not uncommon. He told the ABC he feels "defeated".

Across Victoria, almost 3,786 people spent more than 24 hours in an emergency department between April and June 2026, The Age reported on 29 October. That was up from 3,336 in the January to March quarter. The state's target for those stays is zero.

On 25 October, Premier Ben Carroll opened Labor's campaign with $1.5 billion to expand 12 emergency departments, promising waits up to 20% shorter. Opposition Leader Jess Wilson has pitched a $99 million fund for patient transit lounges and $1.27 billion to halve the elective surgery waitlist.

Victorians vote on 28 November. So which fix matches the problem?

Bigger emergency departments will help a little at the hospitals that get them, mostly in fast-growing areas. They are unlikely to cut waits by anything like 20% on their own, because most of the delay comes from patients waiting for a bed upstairs. Confidence: Likely.

Victorian patients usually see someone fast. The Victorian Agency for Health Information's latest quarterly figures show a median wait of 15 minutes. They also show 73.3% of patients treated within the time their urgency demands.

The trouble starts after that first look. Only 55.2% of patients leave the emergency department within four hours, against a long-standing target of 81%. Much of that gap is what doctors call access block: a patient who needs admission stays on an emergency trolley because no ward bed is free.

The Australasian College for Emergency Medicine calls access block "the single most pressing patient safety issue" in Australian emergency departments. Nationally, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found only 30% of patients later admitted got through within four hours in 2024-25. That group is where the hours pile up.

The best real-world test comes from the US. When a US academic hospital grew its emergency department from 33 to 53 adult beds, researchers led by Bryn Mumma tracked the results.

Walkouts barely moved, while time spent boarding admitted patients rose from 160 to 180 hours a day. The authors concluded expansion alone was not "an adequate solution".

A 2009 simulation in Annals of Emergency Medicine found the same thing in a model. Adding five beds nudged average stays up from 240 to 247 minutes. Moving admitted patients out faster cut them to 218.

Space does matter where demand has outrun the building. The Victorian Auditor-General singled out Werribee Mercy, in Melbourne's growing west, as a department too small for its catchment. Werribee is on Labor's list.

Emergency waits are a symptom of a full hospital. Jonty Karro, an emergency doctor at St Vincent's in Melbourne, told The Age that patients can't leave hospital "until they have somewhere to go".

Some of that blockage sits outside state health departments entirely. The emergency college counted 3,274 older Australians in public hospital beds waiting for an aged care place in early 2026. Aged care is a Commonwealth responsibility.

Demand keeps climbing too. The state government says emergency departments handled a record 513,816 presentations between April and June 2026. An Ambulance Victoria study counted almost 1.5 million ambulance hours lost to handover delays between 2020 and early 2024.

Staff are the other limit. Roderick McRae, president of the doctors' union ASMOF Victoria, said new beds and buildings "cannot provide healthcare" without enough doctors. Labor's plan includes 1,500 health workers, half of them nurses, which goes some way to his point.

Labor's case, as Carroll and his ministers put it, is that this money buys flow along with floor space. Wire service AAP reported at least 250 extra beds alongside the new staff. The government also points to its Timely Emergency Care program, which it says saved 9.6 hours per admission across 22 hospitals.

That record deserves a fair hearing. Victoria's on-time treatment rate has climbed from 65% in 2022-23 to 73.3%. The government says 72% of ambulance patients moved into emergency care within 40 minutes in the June 2026 quarter, its best June result in six years.

Where the evidence pushes back is the size of the promise. The 24-hour stays kept rising while the program ran. AMA Victoria president Simon Judkins welcomed the plan but warned that emergency departments "do not operate in isolation".

The Coalition's transit lounges aim at the same exit door, freeing beds held by patients ready to go home. That logic fits the evidence better, but $99 million across up to 10 lounges is small against the scale of the jam.

Labor has not said how many of the 250 beds are ward beds and how many are emergency cubicles. That split decides most of the answer. The verdict assumes most are cubicles, so a large share of ward beds would make it too gloomy.

A bigger emergency department is a bigger waiting room unless the wards upstairs can take patients faster. Confidence: Likely. Patients in growth areas like Werribee gain most, while older patients waiting for aged care beds stay stuck whoever wins on 28 November.

This piece draws on 19 sources: official Victorian, national and UK data, two peer-reviewed studies, the medical colleges and unions, government releases, and reporting from the ABC, AAP and The Age. Reports differ on bed numbers (ABC reported 150 extra beds, AAP and others 250), and the agency's page does not label the quarter behind its latest figures. The April to June count of 24-hour stays comes from The Age's reading of state data, via a republished copy. On our maths, $1.5 billion across 12 hospitals is about $125 million each. Researched with AI tools; checked and edited by VOID.

Most people in a Victorian emergency department are seen in the time their urgency demands. The long wait comes after, when patients who need admitting sit on trolleys because the wards are full. Making emergency departments bigger helps where they are too small, but it won't fix the bed shortage upstairs, so a 20% cut in waits is a big ask.