How much care do our emergency departments provide?
In Australia, there are 293 public hospitals that have purpose-built emergency departments that are staffed 24 hours a day and provide care to patients who require urgent medical, surgical, or other attention.
Emergency department activity is measured by the number of presentations. In 2021–22, there were 8.79 million presentations to emergency departments – 339.1 presentations per 1,000 population. This has increased from 321.3 presentations per 1,000 population in 2017–18 – an increase of 1.4% a year.
In 2021–22, 71% of presentations occurred between 8 am and 8 pm. The busiest days for emergency department visits were Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.
How urgent was the care?
When a patient presents to the emergency department, they are assigned a triage category by a registered nurse or medical practitioner. The triage category allocated reflects the urgency of the patient’s need for medical and nursing care (Table 3).
Table 3: Emergency department presentations by triage category, 2021–22
|
Resuscitation (should be seen immediately)
|
Emergency (within 10 minutes)
|
Urgent (within 30 minutes)
|
Semi-urgent (within 60 minutes)
|
Non-urgent (within 2 hours)
|
Total
|
Presentations
|
67,589
|
1,333,462
|
3,383,378
|
3,184,019
|
818,373
|
8,789,877
|
Proportion of all presentation (%)
|
0.8%
|
15.2%
|
38.5%
|
36.2%
|
9.3%
|
100%
|
In 2021–22, 26% of patients arrived at the emergency department by ambulance or air rescue service, with the remaining 74% arriving by other forms of transport, including by private car.
Why do people present to emergency departments?
A patient’s diagnosis is established at the end of the patient’s emergency department stay and identifies the main reason for their visit to the emergency department.
In 2021–22, the most common reason for a presentation at an emergency department was for ‘Symptoms, signs, and abnormal findings’ – accounting for 24% of presentations. ‘Symptoms, signs, and abnormal findings’ are symptoms such as abnormalities of heartbeat, abnormalities of breathing, chest pain, nausea and vomiting, headache, and convulsions that are not attributable to a specific diagnosis based on the information available at the time of the care.
The most common diagnoses recorded for emergency department presentations vary by the age and sex of the patient.
For females (as identified in the data) in the 5–14 age group, the most common reason for presentation at an emergency department was ‘Injury and poisoning’. For females in the remaining age groups, the most common reason was ‘Symptoms, signs, and abnormal findings’. For males (as identified in the data) in the 5–44 age group, the most common reason was ‘Injury and poisoning’. For males 45 and over, the most common reason was ‘Symptoms, signs, and abnormal findings’ (Figure 3).