Specialist appointments Performance

Specialist appointment performance

This section provides insights into the operational performance of specialist appointments, including indicators highlighting the number of people on the waiting list, the waiting time to be seen and adherence to clinical care recommendations.

Access to specialist appointments

Patients waiting for an initial specialist appointment may experience wait times before being seen by their treating specialist. The wait times to be seen depend on the demand for each speciality and the urgency of the patient's symptoms or health condition. Patient urgency is categorised by 3 urgency categories, where 1 is most urgent and 3 is least urgent, which provide the clinically recommended timeframe for a patient to be seen for an initial appointment.

Queensland Health reports access to initial specialist appointments by measuring the time that patients waited to be seen for an initial appointment.

Waiting list performance

The clinically recommended timeframe within which a patient should be seen is based on the urgency category the patient has been assigned to:

• Urgent (Category 1): specialist consultation recommended within 30 days of being added to the waiting list
• Semi-urgent (Category 2): specialist consultation recommended within 90 days of being added to the waiting list
• Non-urgent (Category 3): specialist consultation recommended within 365 days of being added to the waiting list.

Queensland Health reports the percentage of patients who are waiting to be seen within the clinically recommended time for their urgency category. The higher this percentage, the better the performance. In some specialties there are a higher number of patients waiting to receive their initial specialist appointment, which may result in patients waiting longer than clinically recommended.