BREAKING NEWS: DISTRAUGHT relatives of a woman who died in an ambulance had to wait for two hours outside the Cairns Base Hospital because staff would not accept the body, paramedics have claimed.

ABC News reports the woman died just as the ambulance in which she was being treated arrived at the hospital's emergency department on Tuesday night.

The Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union says doctors told the ambulance paramedics they would not accept the body and to call police instead.

Union spokesman Bob Lackey told ABC it took two hours for police to arrive and then take the body to the morgue.

"It’s an horrendous thing for the family as well as the paramedics who have to stay there with the patient and the relatives under such trying circumstances,’" he said.

"It's a terrible situation for the relatives – at no time did the hospital see fit to take the patient inside and put it in the privacy of a room."

Mr Lackey told ABC the hospital had accepted recently deceased patients in the past.

A hospital spokesman said it was a coronial requirement that a body remains at the place of death until identified by police.

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