Emergency department care access

How long people wait to be seen in emergency departments (EDs) (waiting time) is a measure of the accessibility of ED care.

Waiting times measure the time elapsed from presentation in the ED to commencement of clinical care.

Measurement of time in the emergency department

Progress of the patient through the ED is recorded using 5 different time points:

Presentation time—the time of first recorded contact with an ED staff member, which may be at the start of clerical registration or of the triage process.
Triage time—the time at which the patient was assigned a triage category, which can coincide with presentation time.
Clinical care commencement—the time at which care by a doctor, nurse, mental health practitioner or other health professional commenced, which can also coincide with presentation time.
Episode end time—the time at which the non-admitted patient ED service episode ended.
Physical departure time—the time at which the patient departed the ED, which can coincide with episode end time.

These time points are used to derive the patient’s waiting time, the duration of clinical care, and the length of the emergency department stay.

Emergency department (ED) waiting time is the time elapsed for each patient from presentation in the ED to commencement of clinical care.

A patient is considered to be 'seen on time' when the time between arrival at the ED and the time that their clinical care starts is within the time specified in the definition of the triage category they are assigned:

Resuscitation: Immediate (within seconds)
Emergency: within 10 minutes
Urgent: within 30 minutes
Semi-urgent: within 60 minutes
Non-urgent: within 120 minutes.

Explore the data

The data visualisation below present the following emergency department waiting time statistics:

Proportion seen on time
50th percentile (median) waiting time
90th percentile waiting time

The data is presented by:

Triage category

By selecting a geography in the visualisation below, the data can also be explored by:

Overall national trends
State and territory
Hospital (where data is available)
Local Hospital Network (LHN) (where data is available).

Highlights

Proportion of patients seen on time has decreased

In 2020–21:

The proportion of patients ‘seen on time’ was 71%, down from 74% in 2019–20.
Principal referral and Women’s and children’s hospitals and Public acute group A hospitals had the lowest overall proportion of presentations ‘seen on time’ (both 68%), and Other hospitals had the highest proportion (90%).
50% of patients were seen within 18 minutes, which was slightly slower than the previous year (17 minutes), but faster than the preceding 3 years (19 minutes).
The time within which 90% of presentations were seen was 1 hour and 42 minutes.

More information about the data Expand

What other information is available?

Appendixes are available to download in the Info and downloads section.

Previous reports can be accessed in the Reports section.

Further information about the concepts on this page can be found in the Glossary.

Emergency department waiting times

The data in this section relates to the waiting times of people who presented to the ED with a type of visit of Emergency presentation.

The progress of the patient through the ED is recorded using 5 different time points: presentation time, triage time, clinical care commencement,
episode end time and physical departure time, as depicted in Figure 1.

These can be used to calculate the waiting times for 50% and 90% of patients, as well as the proportion of patients seen on time.

The waiting time is calculated as the time between arrival at the ED and commencement of clinical care.

Figure 1: Measurement of time patients spend in emergency departments

Emergency department (ED) waiting time is the time elapsed for each patient from presentation in the ED to commencement of clinical care.

Waiting time statistics are presented as the:

50th percentile (median) waiting time
90th percentile waiting time
proportion seen on time

Explore the data

In the data visualisation below, you can explore 2020–21 ED waiting times by the patient’s Indigenous status and remoteness area of usual residence.

Comparisons of ED waiting times by Indigenous status and remoteness area of usual residence should take into account that not all hospital ED services provided in Australia are included and the number of hospitals reporting to the collection varies by remoteness of the hospital.

Highlights

Variation by Indigenous status

Nationally, in 2020–21, the proportion of presentations seen on time for Indigenous Australians was 72%, which was slightly higher than for non-Indigenous Australians (71%).
Indigenous Australians had the same median waiting times across all triage categories as non-Indigenous Australians (18 minutes).
For presentations given a triage category of Urgent, Indigenous Australians had a shorter median waiting time (19 minutes) than non-Indigenous Australians (21 minutes). By contrast, for non-urgent presentations, median waiting times were shorter for non-Indigenous Australians (16 minutes) than for Indigenous Australians (19 minutes).

Variation by remoteness of area of usual residence

Median waiting times for emergency department presentations were longest for people living in Major cities and Inner regional areas (18 minutes) and shortest for those living in Very remote areas (15 minutes).
The largest differences in median waiting times across remoteness areas occurred for presentations assigned a triage category of Urgent —for these patients median wait times varied from 15 minutes for patients living in Remote and Very remote areas to 22 minutes for patients living in Major cities.
Patients living in Major cities had the longest median waiting times for Urgent and Semi-urgent categories.

More information about the data Expand

What other information is available?

Appendix information is available to download in the Info and downloads section.

Previous emergency department care reports can be accessed in the Reports section.

Further information about the concepts on this page can be found in the Glossary.

An emergency department (ED) stay is the period between a patient presenting at an ED, and when that person is recorded as having physically departed the ED (regardless of whether they were admitted, referred, discharged or left at their own risk).

Explore the data

The data visualisation below presents the following measures related to time spent in the emergency department:

proportion of patients with a length of stay of 4 hours or less
50th percentile (median) time spent in the ED
90th percentile time spent in the ED.

The data is presented by:

state and territory
admission status
triage category
peer group.

The data can also be explored by:

trends over time
Local Hospital Network (LHN) (where data is available)
hospital (where data is available).

Highlights

In 2020–21:

90% of ED presentations were completed within 8 hours, and 50% were completed within 3 hours and 1 minute
90% of patients who were subsequently admitted to the same hospital spent more time in the ED (12 hours 57 minutes) than patients who were not admitted (5 hours 53 minutes)
67% of patients had their care completed within 4 hours
for patients subsequently admitted to the same hospital, less than half (42%) of ED presentations were completed within 4 hours
for patients not subsequently admitted, 77% of ED presentations were completed within 4 hours.