Surgery Waits

Methodology

What the numbers are, what they are not, and how they were put together.

Reference period 2024–25 (1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025) · released

Where the figures come from

Waiting times come from the AIHW MyHospitals API, published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. This site uses the 2024–25 reference period, released on 28 May 2026.

Suburb and locality names and locations come from the ABS Australian Statistical Geography Standard 2021, Suburbs and Localities, published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. They are used only to work out which hospitals are near a place you type in.

Queensland also publishes its own figures every three months, and they are shown in their own section on Queensland hospital pages. This site uses July to September 2025, published by Queensland Health on 28 October 2025. They count patients by urgency category and by surgical specialty, not surgeries by procedure, and they cover three months rather than a year — so they are never added to, averaged with or ranked against the national figures. A specialty covers many operations, so a specialty figure is never a figure for one of them.

The build reads a pinned copy of each source, checked against a recorded checksum, so the same data always produces the same pages. The snapshots are downloadable and the licences are set out in full.

What "median waiting time" means

The median is the middle of the list. If a hospital reports a median wait of 68 days for a surgery, half the people who had that surgery there waited less than 68 days and half waited longer. It is not an average, and it is not a maximum: some people waited far longer than the median.

The figures count time on the surgery waiting list — from the day a specialist placed the person on the list to the day the surgery happened. They do not count the wait to see that specialist in the first place, which is often long and is not published here.

Two other measures appear on this site. Surgeries is the number completed in the period; a hospital with a small number can swing a long way from year to year. Waited more than 365 days is the share of people who waited over a year, which says something a median cannot: how bad the tail is.

Searching by everyday words

The source names each surgery in clinical language. So that people can find them, the search box on the home page also matches a hand-written list of everyday words — "piles" finds Haemorrhoidectomy, "gallbladder" finds Cholecystectomy. These aliases exist only to help the search: the source's clinical name is the authoritative one, it is always shown beside a matched everyday word, and an alias never changes a figure. If an everyday word is missing or seems wrong, trust the clinical name.

Why "elective" appears in the source

The source calls this collection "elective surgery". Elective is a technical term meaning the surgery is planned in advance rather than an emergency — not that it is optional. Because that word misleads people, this site says planned surgery, and uses "elective" only here, where the source's own wording has to be quoted.

Suppression: why some cells say "not published"

The source withholds a figure when publishing it could identify someone, or when the underlying data does not support the calculation — for example when a hospital did very few of those surgeries. Those cells say not published on this site. They are never shown as zero, never left blank, and never given a rank. A hospital with a suppressed figure is listed after the ranked hospitals, so it is visible but not silently treated as fast or slow.

Ties share a rank. If two hospitals both report a 95-day median, both are ranked equal and the next hospital takes the rank after the pair.

"Not reported for this period" is a different thing

Suppression is a decision the source made about a figure it holds. Not every gap is that. The collection does not ask every hospital about every surgery in every year: a hospital may have reported a surgery for years and then stop appearing for it, and a surgery may drop out of the collection altogether. Those cells say not reported for this period, in words, and never borrow the suppression wording.

Where that happens, the figure from the last period it was reported is not carried forward and shown as though it were current. The surgery is still listed, with the period the source last reported it, and it is never ranked. The source reported no public hospital figures for this surgery in the current period, so it has no comparison page. Older figures are not carried forward.

The source also publishes a catch-all category that groups every surgery it does not name separately. Nobody waits for it as a procedure, so it is not compared here. The source publishes it as "Other procedure".

Freshness, and the lag you should know about

This is annual data, and it arrives late. The 2024–25 figures cover surgery completed between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025, and were released on 28 May 2026. The newest figure on this site therefore describes a year that had already finished before it was published, and a hospital's waiting list today may be shorter or longer. Every figure on the site carries its reference period and release date for exactly this reason.

How often the data updates

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare publishes the national collection once a year, usually around May. Queensland Health publishes its quarterly figures four times a year. This site checks the sources for a new release every day and rebuilds itself automatically when one appears — the new data passes every automated check before anything is published, so a bad release cannot ship silently.

If a figure here still disagrees with its source, that is an error under the corrections policy, which explains how a report is verified against the pinned snapshots and recorded.

Private hospitals are excluded

Public hospitals only. Private hospitals do not report to this collection, so their waiting times cannot be compared here. There is no comparable private figure to publish, so none is shown or estimated.

Distances are approximate

Distances are straight-line, measured between the hospital's recorded location and the midpoint of the suburb or locality you searched for. They are not road distances or travel times, and a locality midpoint is a rough thing by construction. Treat them as a way of ordering hospitals by rough closeness, not as directions.

What this site does not do