Middlemore Hospital

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Middlemore Hospital is a major public hospital in the suburb of Middlemore, Auckland, New Zealand. The hospital has approximately 800 beds. There are 24 operating theatres across two sites.Founded in 1947, Middlemore Hospital is the largest hospital in Auckland, with around 4,700 staff providing treatment to more than 91,000 inpatients and over 354,000 outpatients per year (data from 2007). The Emergency Department (ED) is the busiest mixed (adult / paediatric) ED in Australasia, with an annual census of 98,110 patients in 2011, and the rate of presentations to ED increasing at a rate of 5–8% per annum. In 2014, Middlemore Hospital treated more general surgical patients than any other hospital in the country (11,500 patients, or over 32 admissions per day), with approximately 75% of those being emergency presentations. This number has also been rising steadily over the past few years and makes the hospital the busiest emergency general surgical hospital in the country. It is also known to care for an above-average share of expecting mothers, staff generally delivering over 20 babies per day.Middlemore is operated by Counties Manukau Health, offering tertiary hospital and specialist care, as well as a range of other health and social services, for the population of Counties Manukau. The defined catchment area stretches from Otahuhu to Port Waikato, and has a population of 525,120 people. The population in this area of Auckland continues to expand at a faster rate than the rest of the country (3.2% per year), and this, in conjunction with increasing population age, is expected to require an expansion of inpatient bed numbers to over 1500 by 2020.