www.lifesaver.org.au

A CRASH victim was airlifted to a Queensland hospital due to bad weather, not a shortage of beds, the NSW government has said.

Georgie Batterson was flown 400km to the Gold Coast for emergency surgery after suffering critical injuries in a car crash on the Pacific Highway on NSW's mid-north coast.

The 56-year-old was originally taken to Kempsey Hospital on Saturday night, where a doctor on the Westpac rescue helicopter spent two hours calling hospitals in Sydney and Newcastle trying to find an intensive care bed for her.

She was eventually airlifted to a private hospital on the Gold Coast, where she remains in an induced coma.

NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca on Wednesday said beds were available at St George, Nepean and Liverpool hospitals but a storm prevented the helicopter from making the trip.

"Between Kempsey and Sydney there was a storm of such magnitude that the doctors on board the chopper and the chopper pilot made the decision that it was quicker and safer to remove her to the Gold Coast trauma centre," Mr Della Bosca told reporters.

"That was the basis of the decision, the absolutely correct clinical decision. I'm backing the doctors and the paramedics ... they made the right call."

However, Mr Della Bosca said he would investigate why it took so long to airlift Mrs Batterson from Kempsey.

He also wanted to know why doctors manually called hospitals to find a bed rather than use the NSW Ambulance Service's Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system.

"The doctors at the hospital elected to make calls, they could have used the ambulance CAD system, I'm interrogating the reasons why that is the case," he said.

Mrs Batterson's son Wayne said his mother was admitted to Kempsey Hospital about 7pm (AEDT), but was not flown to a hospital that could treat her until after midnight.

He said the five-hour ordeal was distressing for his father Ian, who was forced to help lift his wife into the helicopter despite being injured himself in the crash.

"When they got to the helicopter the trolley didn't reach to the right height, they went to push her off the trolley into the helicopter, and it went bang into the side of the helicopter," Mr Batterson told Fairfax Radio Network.

"They then had to lift ... the whole bed off the top of the trolley, and then they didn't have enough manpower there to do that, so they called on my father who had been in the accident to help them.

"He had whiplash and other injuries."

He said the family had no idea Mrs Batterson was being taken to Queensland as the helicopter took off, and they weren't informed until Tuesday that she would be cared for at the Gold Coast and not transferred back to a NSW hospital.

Mr Della Bosca said the lack of the communication was unacceptable.

"I am very concerned to make sure that that doesn't happen again," he said.

NSW Nationals leader Andrew Stoner said the government's recent mini-budget stripped some $330 million from Pacific Highway upgrade funds, and 400 staff from the North Coast Area Health Service.

"This case typifies all that's wrong with the state government in NSW," Mr Stoner told reporters.

"Had the highway been upgraded to a divided dual carriage way as promised by this government by 2006, that accident would not have occurred."