The definitions applied are consistent with the national definitions used for reporting against the National Partnership Agreement on Hospital and Health Workforce Reform. The definitions include presentations that have been assigned a triage category between 1 and 5.  Presentations that are ‘did not wait’, ‘dead on arrival’ or the waiting time to service delivery is invalid are excluded for the purpose of calculating this indicator. See Australasian Triage Scale from the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine for a description of each triage category, including indicative clinical descriptors.

Time to treatment is calculated by subtracting the date and time the patient presented to the emergency department from the date and time treatment commenced. The time to treatment is then compared to the recommended treatment time for the allocated initial triage category. 

The indicator is calculated for the five triage categories as a whole and presented as a percentage.

100 x (Numerator ÷ Denominator)

Calculated separately for each triage category.

Total number of presentations to emergency departments that were treated within benchmarks for each triage category:

• Triage category 1: seen within seconds, calculated as less than 2 minutes (being a waiting time of 2 or below, which allows for 2:59 seconds*).
• Triage category 2: seen within 10 minutes (being a waiting time of 10 or below, which allows for 10:59 seconds*).
• Triage category 3: seen within 30 minutes (being a waiting time of 30 or below, which allows for 30:59 seconds*).
• Triage category 4: seen within 60 minutes (being a waiting time of 60 or below, which allows for 60:59 seconds*).
• Triage category 5: seen within 120 minutes (being a waiting time of 120 or below, which allows for 120:59 seconds*).

* This is in line with the national reporting standards.

• 2014-15 Service Agreement