A code which indicates the type of elective hospital care (elective surgery or other) a patient requires combined with a clinical assessment of the urgency with which the patient requires elective hospital care.

The urgency categories are assigned on the following basis:

Category 1 - admission within 30 days desirable for a condition that has the potential to deteriorate quickly to the point that it may become an emergency.  

Category 2 - admission within 90 days desirable for a condition causing some pain, dysfunction or disability but which is not likely to deteriorate quickly or become an emergency.

Category 3 - admission at some time in the future acceptable for a condition causing minimal or no pain, dysfunction or disability, which is unlikely to deteriorate quickly and which does not have the potential to become an emergency.

Elective admission/Waiting list: categorisation of waiting list patients by clinical urgency assists hospital management and clinicians in the prioritisation of their workloads. It gives health consumers a reasonable estimate of the maximum time they should expect to wait for care.

Clinical urgency classification allows a meaningful measure of system performance to be calculated, namely the number or proportion of patients who wait for times in excess of the maximum desirable time limit for their urgency category.