Patients treated

About the data

The above measures look at:

• patients discharged (all, same-day, emergency admissions)
• hospital bed days
• intensive care unit (ICU) hours of care
• neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and special care nursery (SCN) admissions.

About hospital discharges

Patients can be admitted to hospital in planned ways (e.g. GP referral, including in an emergency) and unplanned ways (e.g. patient has attended an emergency department after suffering an injury and been admitted to hospital).

When a patient is admitted to hospital, that hospital provides them with care or treatment. When the care or treatment is finished, the patient is discharged. They can be admitted and discharged on the same day.

Each discharge is counted as a separation. A separation is when an admitted patient’s episode of care (their total hospital stay from admission to discharge, transfer or death) ends. A separation is also counted when there is a change in the type of care a patient is receiving.

About hospital bed days

Hospital bed days are the number of days that a patient is admitted in hospital. As patients can be admitted and discharged on the same day, the total number of hours from patient admission to discharge is calculated and converted to days.

About ICUs and hours of care

An ICU provides critical care and life support for acutely ill and injured patients.

Average daily hours of care are calculated as the total number of hours all patients have spent in an ICU, divided by the number of days over the 3-month reporting period.

Data are also provided for babies who were admitted to a NICU or SCN.

Notes

• Data source: Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset (VAED). Data extracted on 16 April 2026.
• Parkville Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing Service is a newly reporting campus. From 1 July 2025, responsibility for clinical mental health service delivery at Orygen Specialist Program campuses transferred from Melbourne Health to Parkville Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing Service.
• Cranbourne Community Hospital, a new campus under Monash Health, became operational and commenced reporting separations in October 2025.
• Mernda Community Hospital, a new campus under Northern Health, commenced reporting in January 2026.
• Phillip Island Community Hospital, a new campus under Bass Coast Health, commenced reporting in February 2026.
• Data for Jan-Mar 2026 are incomplete for Wyndham Early Parenting Centre and Tweddle Centre. Results are not available for the Number of hospital bed days, Number of patients discharged, and Number of patients discharged after same day treatment measures
  • Statewide results for these measures exclude these services.
  • Care needs to be taken when assessing results and comparing them to prior periods.
  • Results will be updated next quarter. 
• Data are only provided for patients who were discharged during the 3-month reporting period (e.g. in reporting for a July to September quarter, only patients discharged during this particular period are counted, regardless of the timing of their admission to hospital).
• A patient may have multiple admissions and discharges (separations) during the reporting period.
• There is a one-month lag in data collection between the reporting of a discharge date and the duration of stay in ICU for that separation. As such, results for Average daily hours of care in intensive care units (ICU) are incomplete for the latest quarterly period across all hospitals. Care needs to be taken when assessing results and comparing them to prior periods.
• Average daily hours of care in intensive care units (ICU) excludes data from the Victorian Heart Hospital. 
• 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.