The numerator and denominator include records with a Type of visit of 'Emergency presentation' or 'Not reported'.
Records are excluded from both the numerator and denominator if the Episode end status is either 'Did not wait' or 'Dead on arrival', or if the Waiting time to service is invalid.
See the Australasian Triage Scale for descriptions of each triage category, including indicative clinical descriptors.
Computation:
100 x (Numerator ÷ Denominator)
Calculated overall and separately for each triage category.
Numerator:
Presentations to public hospital emergency departments that were treated within benchmarks for each triage category:
Triage category 1: seen within seconds, calculated as less than or equal to 2 minutes
Triage category 2: seen within 10 minutes
Triage category 3: seen within 30 minutes
Triage category 4: seen within 60 minutes
Triage category 5: seen within 120 minutes
Numerator data elements:
Denominator:
Total presentations to public hospital emergency departments
Denominator data elements:
Disaggregation data elements:
Comments:
Specified disaggregation: Nationally and by state/territory (of hospital location): by Indigenous status, triage category, public hospital peer group
Available disaggregation: Nationally and by state/territory (of hospital location): by Indigenous status, remoteness area, SEIFA of residence, triage category, public hospital peer group
Data for 2008-09 will be available in June 2010.
Most recent data available for 2010 CRC baseline report: 2007-08
Related National Partnership Agreement benchmark/target:
By 2012–13, 80 per cent of ED presentations are seen within clinically recommended triage times as recommended by the Australian College of Emergency Medicine.
Further data development / collection required:
Specification: Interim
Deficiencies have been noted in the current definitions of key data items used to calculate waiting times, i.e. triage date/time, date and time patient presents, date/time treatment commences. NHISSC will oversee work to refine these definitions to ensure greater consistency of collection.
Work is also required on scope and required disaggregations of data from the National Non-admitted Patient Emergency Department Care database.
Work is required to improve the identification of Indigenous Australians within this data.
Other issues caveats:
Disaggregation by peer group should be limited to Peer groups A and B, as this is the scope of the collection, and coverage varies for other hospitals by state and territory.
Disaggregation by Indigenous status will be considered pending confirmation of adequate data quality. Disaggregation based on data for those jurisdictions for which the quality of Indigenous status is considered acceptable.
Some disaggregations could result in numbers too small for publication.
Coverage of the data collection was about 78% of all ED presentations to public hospitals in 2007–08. These data are available for hospitals in Peer Groups A and B, and smaller hospitals in remote areas are less likely to provide these data. This means that data by remoteness area and Indigenous status should be interpreted with caution.
