Nurses association organising manager Susan Pearce said the hospital urgently needed more funding for extra staff so the new emergency department could operate to its full capacity.

Six emergency department beds and the 12-bed emergency medical unit remained closed because there was not enough staff to run them.

"Obviously there's not enough staff and there's continuing pressure from ambulances rolling through the door one after another, which increases the risk of something going wrong," she said.

"It does pose an increased risk to patients."

Mr Della Bosca said an extra $3.6 million was allocated to the Mater for 2009-10, in addition to recurrent funding, which would lead to improvements in patient care.

"This will help address the concerns of the local nurses and doctors and will help open up additional beds ensuring admitted patients can be cared for in a ward rather than the emergency department environment," he said.

Hunter New England Health chief executive Dr Nigel Lyons said he expected the Mater to improve its recent poor performance in admitting emergency patients with the extra funding.

"I've had a discussion with the Mater management and board this week and we talked about the need for us to see quite quickly . . . that these beds are made available and that we see improved performance through the emergency department," he said.

Ms Pearce said the health and ambulance services also agreed to increase ambulances coming to the hospital from four to five an hour.

"[It] is a pretty significant increase in patients when the hospital is already bed blocked," she said.

Dr Lyons said the service agreed to ambulance increases at most of its major Newcastle hospitals to meet demand.

A Mater spokeswoman declined to comment.