If you went looking for how Tamworth or Armidale hospital emergency departments performed in
the last quarter, you would not find a full answer in the state's official report. The Bureau of
Health Information's Healthcare Quarterly for April to June 2026 says centralised data for Hunter
New England Local Health District were unavailable for public reporting
for part of the
quarter, because the district moved to a new state-wide patient record system on 27 May.
What is missing, and for how long
The report sets out three gaps for Hunter New England, the health district whose hospitals include Tamworth, Armidale and Inverell as well as the Hunter's:
- Emergency department and admitted patient data: unavailable for 27 May to 30 June 2026, about the last five weeks of the quarter.
- Elective surgery: unavailable from 30 April to 30 June 2026, two of the quarter's three months.
- Seclusion and restraint: unavailable from 30 April to 30 June 2026, in a separate supplement.
The statewide figures carry the gap with them. The report's count of patients arriving by
ambulance, 187,623, is given not including Hunter New England LHD after 27 May 2026
, and it
says that because of the incomplete data, comparisons at a NSW level cannot be made with the
same quarter the previous year
for activity measures.
Why it happened
NSW Health is replacing its patient records with the Single Digital Patient Record, which the
report describes as bringing a person's health information in one secure system
. Hunter
New England and its NSW Health Pathology sites switched over on 27 May 2026. The report says the
change does not disrupt patient care, but that the work of integrating the systems
means there will be temporary interruptions to the centralised data BHI uses for public
reporting
.
Hunter New England is not the first. Justice Health NSW moved on 25 March 2026, and its admitted-patient data were missing from this report for 25 March to 30 June.
Will the missing months come back?
The report says data that were not available in time will be updated as part of future
releases in digital products such as the BHI Data Portal, when they become available
. It gives
no date for when that will happen for Hunter New England.
The next Healthcare Quarterly, covering July to September 2026, is due on 9 December 2026 under BHI's release plan. It will be the first full quarter with Hunter New England on the new system.
Our view
A temporary gap during a system change is understandable, and BHI has been open about it. But for New England the gap falls on the figures people here watch most, emergency waits and elective surgery, and the promise to backfill them has no date. The useful thing for the district and BHI to publish now is a simple schedule: when the April to June figures for Tamworth and Armidale will appear, and whether the July to September report on 9 December will be complete. Until then, any claim about how New England's hospitals performed in those weeks, good or bad, rests on data the state has said it does not yet have.
What to watch
BHI's Data Portal for the missing Hunter New England months, and the Healthcare Quarterly for July to September 2026, due on 9 December 2026: whether it reports New England's hospitals for the whole quarter.
Sources
- Bureau of Health Information, Healthcare Quarterly, April to June 2026 (PDF, 40 pages, read 3 October 2026): the Single Digital Patient Record transition and its dates, the unavailable data and their periods, the statewide figures that exclude Hunter New England, the comparison caveat and the commitment to update future releases.
- Bureau of Health Information, Release plan (read 3 October 2026): the July to September 2026 Healthcare Quarterly due on 9 December 2026.
- Hunter New England Local Health District, Latest news (read 3 October 2026): the district's own items on care at Tamworth, Armidale and Inverell hospitals.
How we did this
Every quotation is from the BHI report. BHI's site blocks automated access, so we read it in a browser and checked each quotation against the downloaded PDF. Three quotations are marked as human-verified: the report is typeset in two columns and text extraction interleaves them, so we read those sentences down their own column. The weeks and months in the figures panel are our count of BHI's date ranges. We did not contact BHI or the district for this piece. The “our view” paragraph is opinion based on the report quoted.