Telehealth vs Emergency Department Wait Times in Australia 2026

Key findings

• Australians needing urgent GP care face a same-day access gap. The ABS Patient Experience Survey 2023-24 found 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. Over the same window, 94.8% of NewDoc bulk-billed telehealth bookings were seen within 24 hours of booking (8–14 May 2026 sample, n = 849 completed consults). Bulk-billed telehealth is one pathway that addresses the access gap directly.
• Bulk-billed non-emergency care comes in a 3-tier cost cascade: $43–$87 per Medicare bulk-billed GP telehealth consult (MBS Items 91891/91892), $246.50 per Medicare Urgent Care Clinic presentation (Department of Health Second Interim Evaluation, December 2025), and $802 average per non-admitted ED presentation (Productivity Commission RoGS 2025, 2023-24). Routing a non-emergency presentation from ED to UCC is roughly a 3× taxpayer saving; from ED to telehealth, roughly 10×.
• Bulk-billed alternatives measurably divert non-emergency ED demand. The Department of Health's Medicare UCC evaluation (December 2025) found that 45% of UCC patients reported they would have presented to an ED if the UCC had been unavailable (48% after-hours), across 1.8 million UCC presentations. ED demand keeps climbing: 9.1 million presentations in 2024-25, up from 7.6 million in 2015-16 (AIHW MyHospitals 2024-25), and the share of ED visits completed within 4 hours has fallen from 67% in 2020-21 to 53% in 2024-25. Both signals point to a system absorbing non-emergency volume that has cheaper, more appropriate pathways.
• 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. Bulk-billed telehealth offers a consistent national pathway: a NewDoc booked slot is the same wait whether the patient is in Perth or Melbourne.
• NewDoc waits are scheduled, not endured. The 3.7-hour median booking-to-consult wait includes patients who chose a forward-bookable slot at a specific time that suited them (next morning, after work, a weekend appointment); they carry on with their day until the appointment. ED waits, by contrast, are spent sitting in person from arrival to discharge (median total time 3 hours 15 minutes inside the hospital, plus travel each way). The widely cited 18-minute ED wait-to-be-seen reflects an initial triage assessment, not the full care episode.

Telehealth vs Urgent Care Clinic vs ED at a glance

Five structural metrics across the three bulk-billed non-emergency care pathways available to Australians: NewDoc telehealth, a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic (UCC), and a public ED. Telehealth figures are NewDoc data (8–14 May 2026); UCC figures cite the Department of Health's Medicare Urgent Care Clinics Program Evaluation: Second Interim Report (2 December 2025); ED figures cite AIHW MyHospitals 2024-25 and the Productivity Commission Report on Government Services 2025. Clock-time comparisons (raw wait-to-be-seen, 4-hour completion, total length of stay) live in the Key findings above and the wait-distribution section below, not in this table: they are either not like-for-like (ED's 18-minute median is initial triage, not full care) or essentially tied (52.2% vs 53% on the 4-hour rule, declining for ED).

Sources: NewDoc telehealth booking system; Department of Health Medicare Urgent Care Clinics Program Evaluation: Second Interim Report (2 December 2025); Medicare Benefits Schedule (Items 91891/91892); AIHW MyHospitals 2024-25 (ED triage timeframes); Productivity Commission Report on Government Services 2025 (Public hospitals, Table 12A: cost per non-admitted ED presentation).

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% had their consult within 4 hours, 94.8% within the same day, and 5.2% more than 24 hours after booking, a bucket that includes both patients who chose a forward-bookable slot for a specific later time and patients who took the next available slot when same-day capacity was full; the booking dataset doesn't distinguish the two. NewDoc waits are scheduled in either case: a patient picks a slot at booking and carries on with their day until the appointment. ED waits, by contrast, are spent sitting in person from arrival to discharge.

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 had a consult more than 24 hours after booking over the 8–14 May 2026 sample. This bucket includes both patients who chose a forward-bookable slot at a later time that suited them (next day after work, the following weekend) and patients booking the next available slot when same-day capacity was full; the booking dataset doesn't distinguish the two reasons. 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, where the wait reflects an inability to get an earlier appointment; the NewDoc figure measures all completed bookings, urgent and routine alike, on a national bulk-billed telehealth platform with same-day capacity, where the wait can reflect either patient preference for a forward slot or full same-day capacity. Both are nonetheless cited together because they are 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.

Direct evidence that bulk-billed alternatives absorb non-emergency ED demand comes from the Department of Health's Medicare Urgent Care Clinics Program Evaluation: Second Interim Report (2 December 2025), which found that 45% of UCC patients reported they would have presented to an ED if the UCC had been unavailable (48% after-hours), across 1.8 million UCC presentations. UCCs and bulk-billed telehealth GP serve different sub-segments of non-emergency demand: UCCs largely for acute injuries and infections that need in-person assessment, telehealth GP for prescriptions, referrals, certificates, mental-health treatment plans, and conditions manageable by video, but both are designed to keep non-emergency care out of the ED.

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.