Telehealth vs Emergency Department Wait Times in Australia 2026

Key findings

• NewDoc's median telehealth booking-to-consult wait was 3.7 hours across the 8–14 May 2026 sample (n = 849 completed consults). 94.8% of patients were seen inside the same 24-hour window they booked.
• Australia's median ED wait to be seen was 18 minutes in 2024-25 per AIHW MyHospitals — the front of the journey is fast, but the median ED total length of stay is 3 hours 15 minutes, and only 53% of ED visits are completed inside 4 hours (down from 67% in 2020-21).
• ED wait-to-be-seen varies more than 8× across Australian states: NewDoc's ED scraper recorded a 7-day median of 12 minutes in Victoria and 13 minutes in Queensland, but 60 minutes in South Australia and 103 minutes in Western Australia.
• 46.0% of Australians who needed urgent GP care waited 24 hours or more in 2023-24 per the ABS Patient Experience Survey — versus 5.2% of NewDoc telehealth bookings over the comparison window.
• For non-emergency conditions, telehealth and ED have converged on roughly the same total time-in-care (≈ 4 hours from book/arrive to discharge), while NewDoc telehealth removes travel time and is bulk-billed for eligible Medicare cardholders.

Telehealth vs ED at a glance

Six metrics that matter when an Australian is choosing between an online GP and an emergency department for a non-emergency condition. Telehealth figures are NewDoc data (8–14 May 2026); ED figures cite AIHW MyHospitals 2024-25.

Sources: NewDoc telehealth dataset; AIHW MyHospitals 2024-25 ED waiting times and length of stay; Medicare Benefits Schedule.

How long Australians wait for an online GP

The median NewDoc booking-to-consult wait was 3.7 hours across the 8–14 May 2026 sample (n = 849 completed consults). 52.2% were seen within 4 hours, 94.8% inside 24 hours, and just 5.2% waited longer than a day. The wait distribution includes patients who chose a forward-bookable slot rather than the earliest available, so the 3.7-hour median understates how fast the system can be when a patient picks the next available appointment.

NewDoc completed consults, 8–14 May 2026 (n = 849).

ED wait-to-be-seen varies more than 8× across Australian states

Across NewDoc's ED-tracker sample, the median wait to be seen ranged from 12 minutes in Victoria to 103 minutes in Western Australia over the same 8–14 May 2026 window. The pooled national median was 32 minutes (n = 3,790 hospital snapshots across 57 EDs). For context, the AIHW MyHospitals 2024-25 waiting times report a national median wait to be seen of 18 minutes — close to NewDoc's pooled figure but masking the state variance shown below.

Sample sizes reflect per-state scrape cadence and number of tracked EDs, not patient volume. Each row aggregates the published rolling-average wait per hospital snapshot. Tasmania is omitted from this state table — NewDoc's only TAS coverage is one private hospital (Hobart Private), which reported an empty waiting room for 46% of snapshots over this window; the resulting 0-minute median reflects a small private ED often being empty, not state public-system performance.

The 24-hour test: 5.2% vs 46.0%

5.2% of NewDoc telehealth bookings waited longer than 24 hours from booking to consult over the 8–14 May 2026 sample. The ABS Patient Experience Survey 2023-24 reported that 46.0% of Australians who needed urgent GP care waited 24 hours or more for an appointment, and only 41.7% were seen within 4 hours.

The two figures aren't a like-for-like comparison — the ABS measures Australians who self-reported needing urgent GP care across all settings; the NewDoc figure measures all completed bookings, urgent and routine alike, on a national bulk-billed telehealth platform with same-day capacity. Both are nonetheless cited together because they're the closest published 24-hour-band comparison points available.

When telehealth is the right call (and when it isn't)

The wait-time gap matters most for the conditions that don't need a hospital. NewDoc's pre-consult intake shows that the most common reasons Australians book a bulk-billed telehealth GP are conditions where the AHPRA-registered GP, the eScript, and the referral together complete the care episode — see the companion State of Online GP in Australia 2026 report for the top-10 list.

Telehealth is a reasonable first call for non-emergency presentations including cold & flu, UTI, a repeat prescription, a medical certificate, a Mental Health Treatment Plan, and most skin or minor-infection presentations.

An emergency department is the right call for time-critical conditions: chest pain, sudden severe headache, breathing difficulty, stroke symptoms, significant bleeding, severe abdominal pain, fever in a child under 3 months, suspected anaphylaxis, suspected sepsis, suicidal ideation with intent, or anything a caller is told warrants an ambulance. In a clinically urgent emergency, call 000.

Why the wait-time question matters now

Public ED performance against triage-category benchmarks has been falling for a decade. The Productivity Commission Report on Government Services 2025 shows the share of patients seen within their triage-category timeframe fell from 74% in 2014-15 to 67% in 2024-25 nationally. The category-2 (Emergency, 10-minute benchmark) share fell from 79% to 67% over the same period.

In parallel, Australia's ED demand keeps rising — AIHW MyHospitals reports 9.1 million ED presentations in 2024-25, up from 7.6 million in 2015-16 — while the share of ED visits completed inside 4 hours fell from 67% in 2020-21 to 53% in 2024-25. Routing non-emergency presentations away from ED is one of the few short-horizon levers available, and bulk-billed telehealth is the most measured alternative path.

Methodology

• Telehealth sample. All NewDoc completed online-GP consultations in the practice-management system over 8–14 May 2026. The dataset was truncated at the API's default 1,000-row return, of which 849 carried both a booking-creation timestamp and a scheduled-consult timestamp valid for wait-time calculation. Aggregate figures are computed across the 849 completed consults.
• ED sample. 3,790 hospital snapshots from NewDoc's ED-tracker pipeline, drawn over the same 8–14 May 2026 window across 57 hospitals in NSW, QLD, WA, SA, VIC, and TAS. Each snapshot is the rolling-average wait-to-be-seen published by the hospital itself. State sample sizes vary because scrape cadence and hospital count differ between jurisdictions; per-state medians remain robust because each row is itself a hospital-level rolling average.
• Wait-time definition (telehealth). Booking-to-consult is the difference between booking-record creation timestamp and scheduled consult start time. It captures user-experienced wait, including patients who chose a forward-bookable slot rather than the earliest available.
• Wait-time definition (ED). Wait-to-be-seen is the rolling-average time from triage to first clinician assessment, as published by each state's ED-tracker feed. It is not total ED length of stay; AIHW reports the national median ED length of stay separately at 3 hours 15 minutes (2024-25).
• Comparator sources. AIHW MyHospitals (2024-25 ED waiting times and length of stay), ABS Patient Experience Survey (2023-24, urgent-GP-care wait bands), and Productivity Commission Report on Government Services (2025, triage-on-time trend).
• No personally identifiable information appears in the figures above or in either Dataset record. Aggregates are computed from pseudonymous records.

Limitations

• Telehealth wait is bookable-slot-bound. Median wait reflects the slot density NewDoc currently offers and the slot patients chose. If availability changes (more doctors, longer hours), or if patient preference for forward-bookable slots shifts, the median moves independently of demand.
• Telehealth and ED are not interchangeable. Telehealth cannot substitute for hospital-grade investigations, imaging, IV access, or in-person examination. The comparison is informational, not a clinical recommendation. See the "When ED is the right call" passage for the red-flag list.
• ED-tracker rolling averages are not patient-level data. Each hospital snapshot is itself an aggregate published by the hospital. Per-patient medians may differ if state methodologies differ.
• Single-week window. Respiratory-illness presentations are seasonal and ED demand spikes around school holidays and weather events. The report will be re-issued quarterly to track movement.
• NewDoc is a single platform. Findings should be cited as "NewDoc telehealth users" rather than "Australians using telehealth generally".

How to cite this report

Aggregated figures may be quoted with attribution to NewDoc Research. For the underlying anonymised data extract, methodology deep-dive, or media use, contact research@newdoc.com.au.