Nearly one third of the task by the Emergency Department (ED) deals with caring for patients who are not a medical emergency any longer and are just waiting to be shifted to bed in the hospital.

During an expert gathering in Canberra this week new data was unveiled regarding the problems faced by the `access block' which shows that it is very usual practice for a large backlog of patients who have no emergency of any kind but still end up occupying crucial space and resources of the ED in the hospital.

Associate Professor Drew Richardson said, "Caring for patients whose emergency treatment has finished but for whom no inpatient bed is available continues to make up about 30 per cent of all ED workload nationwide."

He is the head of the research and also the chairman of road trauma and emergency at Australian National University Medical School. He records the patients load all across the EDs in Australian hospitals.

This record maintenance is meant to establish the level of their access block which is a problem defined as those patients who required an impatient bed but also wait in the ED for more than eight hours.