Hospitals
Emergency department care over time
This section presents monthly data on presentations to emergency department care between 2018–19 and 2024–25 to highlight the seasonal change in emergency department activity and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on emergency department activity.
Explore the data
Explore the changes in emergency department activity from 2018–19 to 2024–25, by state and territory, triage category, and disease/body system groupings.
Average daily number of presentations to emergency departments by months and states and territories, from 2018–19 to 2024–25
Principal diagnosis
In 2024–25, the Emergency department ICD-10-AM (twelfth edition) Principal diagnosis short list was used to group Principal diagnosis into Disease/body system group. For more information, see METEOR.
Body system groupings
In 2024–25, presentations were grouped into Emergency department ICD-10-AM (12th edition) Principal diagnosis Short list Disease/body system group based on the principal diagnosis at the 3-character level.
The visualisation showing Body system groups include only presentations assigned a Principal diagnosis.
Exceptions to the use of IHACPA body system group are:
- Injury – in which all body system groups with the ‘Injury’ prefix were grouped into a single Injury category
- COVID-19 – the two emergency codes used for COVID-19 (U07.1 and U07.2) have been extracted and placed into a separate ‘COVID-19’ category
- all emergency codes except (U07.1 and U07.2) were placed under the ‘Miscellaneous’ category.
What other information is available on emergency departments?
These data are sourced from the AIHW National Non-admitted Patient Emergency Department Care Database.
- For more data on emergency department care by state/territory see the data tables on the Emergency department care topic page. Data for previous reporting periods is available via the Data downloads page.
- To explore emergency department care data 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.