See Tables 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 and 6.6 for caveat information on these data. Available to download in the data section.
Proportion of patients whose emergency department stay is less than or equal to 4 hours (proportion completed within 4 hours)
The National Healthcare Agreement performance indicator Waiting time for emergency hospital care—proportion of patients whose length of emergency department stay is less than or equal to 4 hours (proportion completed within 4 hours) can be related to the Australian Health Performance Framework dimensions ‘Accessibility’ and ‘Effectiveness’ within the domain ‘Health system performance’. Under the NHA, it relates to the outcome area of Australians receive appropriate high quality and affordable hospital and hospital related care.
The scope of this indicator is all public hospitals reporting to the NAPEDC NMDS.
In general, presentations for patients who required more urgent treatment (reflected by the triage category) were not as likely to be completed within 4 hours. For example, 55% of Resuscitation and 58% of Emergency visits were completed within 4 hours, compared with 79% of Semi-urgent visits and 92% of Non-urgent visits.
Public acute group B hospitals generally achieved a higher proportion of visits completed within 4 hours (76%) than Principal referral and women’s and children’s hospitals and Public acute group A hospitals (67% and 68%, respectively).
Complementary hospital-level data for this indicator is released on the MyHospitals website.
See Appendix A for information on the quality of National Healthcare Agreement data.