Emergency department performance by states and territories

This report has been prepared for the COAG Reform Council. Patients attending Australian ED's are assessed on arrival and clinically classified into one of five 'triage' categories according to how urgently they need to be seen. COAG has adopted a national performance benchmark for each of the five triage categories and these are set out in Attachment 1 (page 32). This project has been undertaken to investigate apparent differences between the jurisdictions in reaching these performance benchmarks. The Council is specifically interested in patients in Triage categories 2 and 3. These are patients who should be seen within 10 and 30 minutes respectively.