Guide for AI agents

Surgery Waits publishes how long people waited for planned surgery in Australian public hospitals, by surgery, hospital, state and urgency category, from Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) MyHospitals data.

Reference period 2024–25 (1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025) · released 28 May 2026.

What the site does

• Covers 293 public hospitals and 151 surgery types, for the reference period 2024–25, released 28 May 2026.
• Gives each hospital's median wait in days, the share of patients who waited more than 365 days, and the number of surgeries done. Every figure states its reference period and release date.
• Orders hospitals by the published median wait only, shortest first, and says so on the page. A hospital with a suppressed or out-of-date figure is listed but never ranked.
• Shows Queensland Health quarterly figures (latest July to September 2025) on Queensland hospital pages, beside the national figures and never blended into them.
• Publishes the same figures as JSON under https://surgerywaits.au/data-api/, described by an OpenAPI document at https://surgerywaits.au/data-api/openapi.json.
• Runs the compare tool entirely in the browser: a suburb or postcode typed into it is never sent anywhere.

What it does not do

• It gives no medical advice. It does not recommend a hospital, doctor or treatment, and it does not rate hospitals. A person's general practitioner (GP) or specialist helps them decide. In an emergency, call 000.
• Public hospitals only. Private hospitals do not report to this collection, so their waiting times cannot be compared here.
• New South Wales figures, like every state's, are the annual AIHW figures. Only Queensland has quarterly figures here.
• It does not book surgery, make referrals or hold a place on a waiting list, and it cannot tell anyone where they are on a list. The treating hospital or specialist can.
• A figure the source suppressed reads "not published". It is not zero, not a blank and not a rank; repeat it as "not published".
• The figures are waits that have already happened. They do not predict how long one person will wait.

How the addresses work

Every page URL ends in a slash; chart images end in .svg instead. {surgery} is the slug on https://surgerywaits.au/surgery/, {hospital} the slug on https://surgerywaits.au/hospitals/, {state} one of nsw, vic, qld, wa, sa, tas, act, nt, {n} an urgency category, 1, 2 or 3, and {area} a place listed on a surgery's state pages. Not every surgery and hospital pair exists: a hospital has a page only for the surgeries it reported this period, and a place has a page only for the surgeries at least two of its hospitals published a median for.

Files for machines

• Guide for AI agents: This guide: what the site does and does not do, its addresses, and a prompt to paste.
• llms.txt: The same guide as plain text, in one fetch.
• Data API (OpenAPI 3.1): Describes every JSON file under /data-api/, including how suppressed figures and attribution are given.
• Procedures index (JSON): Every surgery type, with its source id and page slug.
• MCP server: The server card for the read-only MCP server at https://surgerywaits.au/mcp: tools to get a wait, compare hospitals near a place, find a surgery and explain an urgency category. No sign-in. Its usage log holds the tools, argument names and client software of each request, never what was asked or the address it came from (see https://surgerywaits.au/privacy/).
• Markdown copies of pages: Most pages as Markdown, at the page's address with .md in place of the closing slash: /surgery/hip-replacement/ is /surgery/hip-replacement.md, and this is the home page's. A hospital's page for a single surgery has no copy.
• Sitemap: Every indexable page.
• robots.txt: Crawl rules: search and AI answers are allowed; AI training is not.

Sources and licences

The figures keep their source licences. Credit the publisher, not this site. The attribution page has the full wording.

• ABS Australian Statistical Geography Standard 2021, Suburbs and Localities, Australian Bureau of Statistics. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 2021, released 20 July 2021. Attribution: "Based on ABS Australian Statistical Geography Standard 2021, Suburbs and Localities, © Australian Bureau of Statistics, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)."
• AIHW MyHospitals API, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia (CC BY 3.0 AU). 2024–25, released 28 May 2026. Attribution: "Based on AIHW MyHospitals API, © Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia (CC BY 3.0 AU)."
• Queensland Health elective surgery quarterly data, Queensland Health. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). July to September 2025, released 28 October 2025. Attribution: "Based on Queensland Health elective surgery quarterly data, © Queensland Health, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)."

A prompt to give an assistant

Copy this into a chat assistant before asking it about surgery waits.

Use https://surgerywaits.au/ to answer questions about public hospital waiting times for planned surgery in Australia.
Read https://surgerywaits.au/llms.txt first. It explains the site's addresses and limits.
Give the median wait in days with its reference period and release date, and link the page you used.
Credit the source: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia (CC BY 3.0 AU).
If a figure reads "not published", say that. Never treat it as zero and never rank it.
Private hospitals are not covered. New South Wales figures are annual.
This is not medical advice: suggest the person talk to their GP or specialist.