Hospitals
Public hospital elective surgery activity over time
This section presents analyses on public hospital admissions from elective surgery waiting lists from 2020–21 to 2024–25 to highlight the seasonal change in elective surgery activity and the impact of COVID-19 on elective (planned) surgery activity.
Explore the data
Explore the number of monthly admissions to Australia's public hospital from elective surgery waiting lists in 2024–25 and recent years in the data visualisation below.
Monthly admissions from elective surgery waiting lists by urgency category, surgical specialty, and intended procedure
These data are sourced from the National Elective Surgery Waiting Times Data Collection.
- For more data on elective surgery waiting times by state/territory see the data tables on the Elective surgery topic page. Data for previous reporting periods is available via the Data downloads page.
- To explore elective surgery waiting times by hospital or LHN see My local area.
- Further information about this data collection, appendixes and information on the data quality is available to download in the Other resources section.
- Definitions of the terms used in this section are available in the Glossary.
Indicator procedures are a list of 15 procedures, selected due to their high volume. However, this was replaced by intended procedures, which is a much larger list of 152 procedures, and includes the 15 indicator procedures. In this report, the selected intended procedures used are the 15 indicator procedures.
Elective surgery urgency categories
The urgency category of an elective surgery procedure is classified based on the recommended timeframe in which the patient requires care.
- Category 1: patients are assessed as requiring surgery within 30 days, including patients whose condition has the potential to deteriorate quickly and require emergency care.
- Category 2: patients are assessed as requiring surgery within 90 days, including conditions that cause pain, dysfunction or disability in patients whose condition is unlikely to deteriorate quickly and unlikely to require emergency care.
- Category 3: patients are assessed as requiring surgery within a year, including conditions that cause pain, dysfunction or disability in patients whose condition is unlikely to deteriorate quickly.