When Are Emergency Departments Busiest?

How these figures are calculated

• NewDoc read each state's public live feed every 10 minutes from 13 April 2026 to 1 November 2026. Each hospital's readings were reduced to one value per clock hour (the median reading in that hour, local time), giving 131,034 hospital-hours, then averaged by hour of day, day of week and 4-hour block.
• Readings were left out when a whole state's feed stopped changing for more than 2.5 hours, or when one hospital's figures stayed identical for more than 12 hours. SA average waits of 0 were treated as missing, as most came with patients still waiting.
• NSW: NSW Health's live feed gives the number of patients assessed by a triage nurse and waiting for treatment. It does not include a wait time.
• SA: SA Health's dashboard gives the number of patients waiting to be seen and the average time from arrival to being seen by an emergency department clinician over the past 2 hours, excluding high priority cases. An hour's wait figure therefore describes patients seen in the 2 hours before the reading. SA updates its figures about every 30 minutes, so an SA hour can reflect data up to half an hour older.
• “Patients waiting” counts people triaged and still waiting at that moment, not arrivals. A department with few people waiting can still be busy with patients in treatment.
• The study covers the 20 NSW public emergency departments NewDoc tracks with readings for at least 90% of the period, and the 7 metropolitan Adelaide public emergency departments on SA Health's dashboard: not every department in either state. Private hospitals are not included. Armidale Hospital, Belmont Hospital, Cessnock Hospital, Grafton Base Hospital, Kempsey District Hospital, Maitland Hospital, Shoalhaven District Memorial Hospital, Singleton Hospital, Tamworth Hospital and Wyong Hospital (NSW) are left out until they have readings for 90% of the period. The period includes public holidays.

Sources and licence

NSW Health, Emergency Department waiting times. © State of New South Wales NSW Ministry of Health. For current information go to www.health.nsw.gov.au. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (NSW Health copyright).

SA Health, Emergency Department dashboard, Government of South Australia. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (SA Health copyright).

Changes made by NewDoc: live readings recorded every 10 minutes, cleaned as described above, reduced to hourly values and averaged by hour, day and hospital, and peak and quiet times picked out. Neither NSW Health nor SA Health has reviewed or endorsed these calculations.

When quoting these figures, please credit NSW Health and SA Health as the data sources. A link to this page is appreciated when the hour-by-hour patterns are useful.

Cite this page: NewDoc (2026). When Are Emergency Departments Busiest? NSW and SA public emergency departments, 13 April 2026 to 1 November 2026. Based on NSW Health and SA Health data (CC BY 4.0). Available at https://www.newdoc.com.au/research/emergency-department-busiest-times