Information for general practitioners

What a hospital and surgery page shows

The page shows each figure that the hospital published for the surgery. These figures are the median wait, the number of surgeries and the share of patients who waited longer than 365 days. The page also shows the state and national figures for the same surgery beside the hospital's figure.

The page ranks the hospital on each published figure against every public hospital that published the same figure for the same period. It lists nearby public hospitals with a shorter median wait for the surgery, including hospitals in other states. It charts the median for each year the source published it.

• Surgery
• Hospitals
• States
• Waits across state borders

Urgency categories

The urgency pages show how often each public hospital treated patients within the recommended time. The recommended time is 30 days for category 1, 90 days for category 2 and 365 days for category 3.

A specialist assigns the category after assessing the patient, and the site cannot predict it. The publisher reports urgency figures by category and surgery figures by surgery, so the site shows the two sets apart.

• Urgency categories

Reading a figure with a patient

A median is the middle waiting time. Half of the patients treated waited less than the median, and half waited longer. The median does not show how long the longest waits ran, so the share of patients who waited longer than 365 days appears beside it.

A median that rests on fewer than 50 surgeries moves more when one patient's wait changes. The number of surgeries appears beside each median.

The guides explain the same points in plain language for a patient.

• Guides
• Referral to a different hospital

What the figures leave out

The published figures do not cover these points.

• The figures leave out the wait to see a specialist. They count the time on the surgery waiting list, so the time before a patient joins the list is outside it.
• The figures do not show a patient's own place on a list, and the site does not predict one patient's wait.
• The figures cover public hospitals only. The site holds no figure for a private hospital.
• The figures do not show the current state of a hospital's list. Each figure describes a period that ended before the release.
• The site labels a withheld figure not published and gives it no rank. It never shows a withheld figure as 0.
• The site shows a figure from an earlier period with its own period and gives it no rank.

Queensland quarterly figures

Queensland Health publishes quarterly figures by urgency category and by specialty. The site shows them in a separate section on Queensland hospital pages. It does not rank them, add them to a national figure or compare them with one.

Where the figures come from

The waiting times come from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare through its MyHospitals data. The data page lists each dataset with its version, release date and licence.

• Data and attribution
• Methodology

The decision

The site does not recommend a hospital, a doctor or a treatment. The choice of hospital rests with the patient and the treating doctors.