WaitFinder for general practitioners

Published waiting times, arranged for the moment a referral is written.

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

Referral is the one moment where a published waiting time is actually actionable, and it is the moment the figures are hardest to look up: they are released once a year, one hospital and one surgery at a time, and never side by side across a state border. This site puts them side by side. It is free, carries no advertising, and asks for nothing about you or your patient.

What you can see while the patient is in the room

• Median waiting time for planned surgery, per surgery type, per public hospital, from the national collection the hospitals report to.
• The nearby alternatives, ordered by the measured number — including hospitals across a state border, which are included by default rather than as an option.
• State and national medians beside each hospital, so a figure has something to be read against.
• Fourteen years of history for a hospital and surgery, which shows whether a wait is an unusual year or a settled pattern.
• Urgency-category performance — how often each category was treated within its recommended time — kept as a separate lens. It is never blended with the per-surgery figures, because the source publishes them as two different views.

You can refer to any public hospital, including interstate. The patient-facing guide to referral to another hospital sets out what that involves, and is written to be handed over or read at home.

Built for the consult room: nothing retained, nothing sent

A search here leaves no trace on the machine you ran it on. There are no cookies, no local or session storage, and no search terms in the address bar or the browser history — so the next patient sitting in that chair cannot see what you looked up for the last one.

The search resolves entirely in the browser against a static dataset served by this site. Nothing a patient's details could be inferred from is transmitted, because nothing is transmitted: there are no third-party requests, no analytics and no tracking of any kind. These are not policy statements. They are checked automatically on every change to the site, and a change that breaks one of them does not ship.

The take-away sheet

From the compare tool, select the hospitals worth discussing and print a one-page sheet: the surgery, the hospitals and their published figures with the period and release date, and the questions worth asking at the specialist appointment. The sheet is generated on the device and sent nowhere. It is meant to leave with the patient.

Limits worth stating plainly

• These are historical medians of surgery already completed. They are not a live queue position and not a prediction of any individual patient's wait.
• The measured wait starts when the patient is placed on the surgery waiting list. The outpatient and specialist-clinic queue before that is not in this data, and it can be long — often longer than the figure shown.
• Urgency category is assigned by the treating specialist after assessment. Nothing here anticipates it, and the categories are not comparable across the per-surgery medians.
• A suppressed value renders as “not published”, never as zero and never as a rank. A hospital with a suppressed figure is listed, unranked, rather than quietly dropped or treated as fast.
• A hospital that stopped reporting a surgery is shown unranked, with the period the source last carried it. Old figures are never carried forward as current.
• Private hospitals do not report to this collection. Public hospitals only. Private hospitals do not report to this collection, so their waiting times cannot be compared here.

The data, and how often it moves

The comparable baseline is the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's MyHospitals annual collection, licensed CC BY 3.0 AU. The current build uses 2024–25, and every figure on the site carries its reference period and release date, because annual data arrives well after the year it describes.

Queensland publishes quarterly figures as well, and they are shown on Queensland hospital pages as a separate, clearly labelled overlay — fresher, but counted by specialty and urgency category over three months rather than by procedure over a year. They are never added to, averaged with or ranked against the national figures.

The full account is in the methodology, and the pinned source snapshots, their checksums and licences are on the data page.

Common questions

Can I refer a patient to a public hospital in another state?

Yes. A referral can name a specialist at any public hospital, including one across a state border. The receiving hospital decides whether it accepts the referral, and the patient carries the travel and accommodation costs.

Is anything a GP searches on WaitFinder stored or sent anywhere?

No. The search runs in the browser against a static dataset. There are no cookies, no local or session storage, no search terms in the address bar or browser history, and no third-party requests. Automated checks enforce this on every change.

Does the waiting time shown include the wait to see the specialist?

No. The figures count time on the surgery waiting list, from the day a specialist places the patient on it to the day of surgery. The outpatient clinic wait that comes first is not in this collection and can be long.

WaitFinder is not medical advice and does not recommend any hospital, doctor or treatment. It republishes official statistics about waiting times that have already happened. The referral decision is yours, made with your patient.