Elective surgery:

Categorisation of waiting list patients by clinical urgency assists hospital management and clinicians in the prioritisation of their workloads. It gives health consumers a reasonable estimate of the maximum time they should expect to wait for care. Clinical urgency classification allows a meaningful measure of system performance to be calculated, namely the number or proportion of patients who wait for times in excess of the maximum desirable time limit for their urgency category (metadata item the overdue patient status).