Urgency categories explained
When you are placed on a public hospital waiting list for planned surgery, you are given an urgency category. Your treating specialist assigns your urgency category after they assess you. It is a clinical judgement about how quickly your surgery should happen — not something you choose, and not something a website can work out for you.
The three categories
- Category 1 — urgent. Surgery is recommended within 30 days.
- Category 2 — semi-urgent. Surgery is recommended within 90 days.
- Category 3 — non-urgent. Surgery is recommended within 365 days.
The recommended time is a target, not a promise. Hospitals report how many people they treated within the recommended time for each category, and that figure is on every hospital page on this site.
How categories relate to the waiting times here
The waiting time for a surgery type — a hip replacement, say — covers everyone who had that surgery, in all three categories together. Those two views are never mixed on this site: a hospital page shows the surgery figures and the urgency figures separately, because combining them would invent a number nobody published.
So a hospital with a short median wait for your surgery may still be slower for your category, or faster. Take both numbers to your appointment and ask.
What to ask
- What urgency category am I likely to be, and why?
- What is the recommended time for that category, and how often does this hospital meet it?
- Does my category change if my condition changes while I am waiting?