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Methodology
ED Wait Time (Category 3) — Methodology and Sources
What this measures
The percentage of Victorian Category 3 (urgent — clinically recommended maximum wait of 30 minutes) emergency department patients seen within that recommended time, all public hospitals statewide.
Higher is better. There is no formal Vic-wide statutory target for this metric, but ROGS uses 75% as a reference point for "good" performance.
How values are derived
The Productivity Commission's annual Report on Government Services (ROGS) publishes Patients-seen-on-time percentages by triage category and state in Table 12A.13, sourced from the AIHW National Non-admitted Patient Emergency Department Care Database.
| FY | Vic Cat 3 seen on time | ROGS release |
|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | 73% | 2020 |
| 2015-16 | 71% | 2020 (matches 2026) |
| 2016-17 | 70% | 2020 (matches 2026) |
| 2017-18 | 68% | 2020 (matches 2026) |
| 2018-19 | 66% | 2020 (matches 2026) |
| 2019-20 | 65% | 2026 |
| 2020-21 | 63% | 2026 |
| 2021-22 | 58% | 2026 |
| 2022-23 | 61% | 2026 |
| 2023-24 | 68% | 2026 |
| 2024-25 | 69% | 2026 |
Overlapping years (2015-16 to 2018-19) match exactly across the two releases.
Reading the line
- A slow decline from 73% in 2014-15 to 66% in 2018-19.
- Pandemic-era trough of 58% in 2021-22.
- Recovery to 68-69% by 2024-25 — still below the 2014-15 level but better than the depths of the pandemic.
Caveats
- ROGS reports whole-percent values (no decimals).
- This is the state-wide all-public-hospitals figure; ROGS publishes the same series broken by remoteness and Indigenous status.
- "Patients seen on time" is the time-to-treatment metric, not length-of-stay.
Sources
- Productivity Commission — Report on Government Services 2026, Section 12 Public hospitals
- ROGS 2026 public hospitals dataset CSV
- VAHI — Victorian Health Services Performance (publishes the same underlying data with quarterly granularity)