About Surgery Waits

An independent comparison of published public hospital surgery waiting times, run by National Digital.

Who runs it

Surgery Waits is built and run by National Digital, an Australian software company. National Digital is a private, commercial organisation that also builds free, independent civic tools like this one — for professional development and as a contribution to the community.

Why it exists

Public hospitals across Australia report how long people waited for planned surgery, and the figures are published — once a year, one hospital and one surgery at a time. What was never published is the comparison: the same surgery, at the hospitals near you, side by side, including across a state border, where the shorter wait often is. Surgery Waits is that comparison, and nothing else.

How it is funded

Surgery Waits is paid for by National Digital. It carries no advertising and no sponsorship, sells nothing, links to no paid service, and collects nothing about the people who use it — the methodology sets out the privacy properties and the automated checks that enforce them.

Not affiliated with anyone whose numbers it shows

Surgery Waits is not connected with any government, health department, hospital or health service, or with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. The publishers of the source data have no involvement in this site and do not endorse it. Any error in how their figures are presented here is this site's error, not theirs — the corrections policy says what happens when one is found.

How the data flows

1. The source publishes. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare publishes the national planned-surgery collection; Queensland Health publishes its own quarterly figures.
2. A snapshot is pinned. The exact bytes of each release are stored with a recorded SHA-256 checksum. A download that does not match its checksum stops the build.
3. The site is rebuilt from the snapshot. Every page is generated from the pinned data — nothing is estimated, edited by hand, or carried forward from an older release as though it were current. The same data always produces the same pages, byte for byte.

The current build uses the 2024–25 national collection, released on 28 May 2026. The snapshots, their checksums and licences are on the data page.

Contact

This domain deliberately sends and receives no email. To report an error, ask a question or reuse something, use National Digital's contact page.