Metro North Specialist appointments

Specialist appointments

Queensland Health provides free access to specialist appointments and resulting surgeries that can be planned and booked in advance.

If a patient's condition requires a specialist opinion or treatment beyond what is available within the primary healthcare setting, they may be referred by their GP to a specialist. Specialists are doctors or surgeons who have completed advanced training in a specialist area of medicine, grouped according to the area of the body or condition that is being treated.

A specialist appointment may be delivered at either a hospital or specialist clinic (also called outpatient clinics), or via telehealth. Specialist appointments do not require the patient to be admitted to hospital to get treatment.

Specialist appointment activity

This section provides information about the number and type of appointments held in this HHS.

At a glance

Waiting lists for specialist appointments

Patients in need of a specialist appointment are often referred for treatment to the nearest hospital or clinic that has available resources to manage the condition. Once the referral is accepted by the hospital or clinic, the specialist will prioritise the patient's need for consultation and allocate the patient an urgency category (1 to 3), where 1 is most urgent and 3 is least urgent. The patient will then be placed on a waiting list for their initial appointment. The time a patient waits may depend on the demand for each specialty and the urgency of their symptoms or health condition.

Specialist appointments held

An initial specialist appointment (sometimes called an initial service event) is the first appointment a patient has with a specialist doctor or surgeon in an outpatient clinic or hospital, for treatment or management of the condition for which they have been referred. When a patient has had their initial service event, they are removed from the specialist appointment waiting list.

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.