Long waits for emergency care

This is talk about long waits for emergency care, five of the state's major hospitals were treating fewer than half their emergency patients within four hours in the first three months of this year. State government have pledged to treat 90 percent of emergency department patient within four hours by 2015 in return for extra commonwealth hospital funding. But the latest date for the period January to March 2013 shows fewer than one in four hospital are meeting even their interim targets. Other data shows some hospitals are failing to deliver elective surgery on time to patient rated as ''urgent" .