Waiting time to treatment
Hospital emergency departments provide urgent care for seriously ill and injured Victorians. When a patient arrives at an emergency department, they are 'triaged' (assessed) for urgency and categorised on a scale from Triage Category 1 (requires resuscitation - immediate treatment) to Triage Category 5 (non-urgent - treatment within 2 hours).
Tap the buttons below for specific data about waiting time in emergency departments. You can filter by urgency category and hospital.
Scroll down further for more information about the data (measures).
About the data
The above measures look at:
- median waiting time
- 90th percentile waiting time.
About waiting time
The time in minutes between when a patient presented at the emergency department and when they were first seen by a nurse or a doctor for treatment.
All waiting times are sorted from shortest to longest, and the time that sits in the middle is the median waiting time (or 50th percentile waiting time). It represents the amount of time by which half of patients presenting to an emergency department were seen by a nurse or doctor.
The 90th percentile waiting time is the amount of time by which 90% of all patients presenting to an emergency department were seen by a nurse or doctor.
Notes
- Data source: Victorian Emergency Minimum Dataset (VEMD). Data extracted on 16 April 2026.
- Apr-Jun 2025 results for Box Hill hospital erroneously include 633 presentations that occurred at and were also reported by Angliss and Maroondah hospitals. The error was only identified after data for the financial year had been finalised and therefore could not be corrected.
- In 2024–25, Northern Health’s emergency department (ED) presentation scope included telehealth (a subset of virtual care) delivered to patients at urgent care centres, residential aged care facilities, correctional facilities, and other emergency departments. From 2025–26, the scope of the Victorian Virtual Emergency Department model was expanded to include virtual care provided to patients at these locations, and therefore these presentations will be excluded from ED performance results. This scope change impacts Statewide and Northern Health’s 2025–26 ED performance results. Comparisons to prior years may not be reliable and affected measures should be interpreted with caution.
- Results for the current financial year are preliminary and may change from quarter to quarter. Final results will be available in November. Results from the previous financial year have been finalised.
- * No results are available.