Dear Queensland Department of Health,

If possible, please treat this as an administrative or informal request. Otherwise, please consider this a request under the FOI Act.

I am trying to understand activity levels in our public health system, specifically in acute HHS hospitals. I have searched online for this data and recent data is not available, nor is there a source where I am able to see trends over a significant time period and compare this for various HHS acute hospitals.

I would like to request the following data for each HHS's in Queensland. I would ideally like this data for a period of the last 5 financial years so I can look at trends.

Emergency Department monthly data by urgency category for the following:
- Number of attendances
- Patients seen within clinically recommended times
- Median waiting time to treatment (in minutes)
- Percentage of patients who did not wait for treatment
- Patients admitted to an inpatient bed
- Patients whose ED stay was within four hours
- Number of patients who left after treatment commenced
- Percentage of patients who left after treatment commenced
- Number of patients who did not wait for treatment

Monthly elective surgery information by urgency category
-Number of patients treated
-Variation in number of patients treated
-Patients treated within the clinically recommended time
-Number of patients waiting
- Number of patients waiting longer than the clinically recommended time – ready for surgery
- Number of patients waiting longer than the clinically recommended time – not ready for surgery
-Patients waiting within the clinically recommended time – ready for surgery

Monthly elective surgery information on patients treated in turn
- Category 2 and 3 patients treated in turn

Monthly elective surgery information by surgical specialty
-Number of patients treated
-Variation in number of patients treated
-Patients treated within the clinically recommended time
-Number of patients waiting
-Number of patients waiting longer than the clinically recommended time – ready for surgery
-Number of patients waiting longer than the clinically recommended time – not ready for surgery
-Patients waiting within the clinically recommended time – ready for surgery

Quarterly elective surgery information by urgency category
-Median waiting time to treatment (days)
-90th percentile waiting time to treatment (days)

Quarterly elective surgery information by surgical specialty
-Median waiting time to treatment (days)
-90th percentile waiting time to treatment (days)

Quarterly hospital activity information
-Patient admissions
-Same day admissions
-Overnight admissions
-Emergency admissions
-Outpatient services
-Babies born

Quarterly information for Specialist Outpatients
-Patients waiting for an initial service event in a specialist outpatient clinic (non-surgical & surgical)
-% Patients waiting within the clinically recommended time (by clinic specialty)

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Yours faithfully,

Roy Elliot

Dear Ms Blackmore,

I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

I have reviewed the websites that you have provided above and couldn't find data that dated back longer than a year or so on the topics identified above. I actually used the websites above to create my original request.

[1] & [2] provide a good snapshot for the most recent month for the list above, and there are even some items which are graphically displayed for the last year which is good but not really sufficient to find trends.

[3] & [4] are great data sets and is what I am looking for but again as you identified they only go back a year or so.

I will make my enquiry with [5] to see if they are able to provide the data. Again I really appreciate your time to respond in this matter.

Yours sincerely,

Roy Elliot