Data released by Health Minister David Davis on Thursday shows there were 3678 children waiting for elective surgery at the Royal Children’s Hospital on December 31 last year, in the longest waiting list of any hospital in Victoria.

Just 66 per cent of children received semi-urgent surgery within the clinically recommended 90-day time at the hospital between October and December last year, compared to 91 per cent during the same quarter in 2010.

The number of children who did not receive semi-urgent surgery on time has increased almost five-fold over the past three years - from 55 between October and December in 2010 to 271 in the same quarter last year.

Semi-urgent paediatric surgery includes hernia and tonsil removals, insertion of grommets to improve hearing, urological procedures and plastic surgery to repair deformities.

The Victorian chairman of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, Robert Stunden, described the delays as ‘‘appalling’’ and said they highlighted a lack of long-term planning to meet increasing demand.

Australian Medical Association state president Stephen Parnis said the figures reinforced the significance of the AMA’s state budget submission calling for a $24 million paediatric surgery boost to cut waiting lists.

He said more paediatric surgery needed to be done outside the Royal Children’s Hospital, including hospitals with paediatric expertise such as Sunshine, Northern and Frankston.

‘‘We can’t sit on our hands and wait for the new Monash Children’s Hospital to answer everything, because it won’t,’’ Dr Parnis said.

Mr Davis agreed that more work needed to be done to reduce excessive waiting times for paediatric surgery.

‘‘The government is determined to reduce those times,’’ he said.

Across Victoria, 69 per cent of patients received semi-urgent elective surgery on time, down from 74 per cent in the same quarter in 2010. For adults, such surgery can include hip and knee replacements or a hysterectomy.

But performance by individual hospitals was patchy, with about half of patients facing excessive waits for semi-urgent elective surgery at Monash Medical Centre and the Dandenong, Royal Melbourne, Casey and Frankston hospitals.

A total of 48,094 patients were waiting for elective surgery at public hospitals in Victoria on December 31 last year. Dr Parnis said this was 10,000 more patients than when the Coalition government was elected in November 2010 and the paediatric waiting list ‘‘blowout’’ was particularly concerning.

He said the government had not provided details on any new beds it had created, despite promising an additional 800 beds prior to being elected.

It was also unclear how long patients were waiting to see specialists for referral to surgery, in what has been dubbed a ‘‘hidden waiting list’’, Dr Parnis said.

In emergency departments, the most urgent patients were largely treated within time and fewer patients remained on trolleys in emergency departments for more than 24 hours (163 patients) compared to a year earlier (248 patients).

Mr Davis highlighted figures showing 83 per cent of patients were transferred from ambulances into emergency departments within 40 minutes, up from 77 per cent a year ago.

He said the figures showed that measures to reduce ambulances queuing outside hospitals were working.

He was concerned, however, that a $6 fee for patients to visit a doctor, which the federal government appears set to introduce in its upcoming budget, could increase the workload for Victorian hospitals.

‘‘We will certainly advocate to the Commonwealth very strongly against making primary care more difficult to access,’’ Mr Davis said.