About the ambulance service dashboard

Data outage notification

Flinders Medical Centre (FMC) data will not be available due to scheduled Patient Administration System upgrade and configuration. The outage remains until data flow is re-established and/or any data issues are resolved.

SA Health apologises for any inconvenience.

The Ambulance Service dashboard was developed to assist improved patient access to Emergency Departments (ED) in metropolitan Adelaide. 

The dashboard consists of the following six sections:

  • Emergency Department status
  • Ambulance – last 3 hours
  • Triage categories
  • 24 hour activity graph
  • Inpatient General Bed status
  • Available Specialty Beds and Capacity & Occupancy tables

The content of all sections (except Ambulance) is drawn from the existing ED and Inpatient dashboards and provides a near real time combination of patient flow data. It includes information about average ambulance clearance times and the number of ambulances at hospitals for 30 minutes or more in the previous three hours.

View the Ambulance Service dashboard

More information about the Ambulance Services dashboard is available on the  Ambulance Service dashboard fact sheet (PDF 170KB).

The Ambulance Service dashboard at a glance

ED status

The ED table provides a status summary of all metropolitan emergency departments and includes specific breakdowns for the number of patients in a resuscitation area.

Dashboard users can click on specific hospitals in the table to update the Triage Category and 24 Hour Activity graph sections of the dashboard.

ED status is calculated from the total number of patients in the ED (both in treatment spaces and in the waiting room), versus the total capacity of the ED.

  • Green: Total number of patients in ED is less than 80% of total beds
  • Amber: Total number of patients in ED is greater than or equal to 80% of total beds, but less than 95%
  • Red: Total number of patients in ED is greater than or equal to 95% of total beds, but less than 125%
  • White: Total number of patients in ED is greater than or equal to 125% of total beds.

All hospitals have processes in place to ensure they can continue to function safely and effectively during periods of high demand.

All patients presenting at an ED are triaged and seen as quickly as possible, depending on the treatment they need.

Ambulance – last three hours

This table displays ambulance statistics for the previous three hours, relevant to each ED. It includes:

  • the number of ambulance clearances (Clr)
  • average clearance time (ACT)
  • the number of cleared ambulances that took longer than 30 minutes to leave the ED.

Ambulance clearance times for higher acuity patients can sometimes take longer, due to the complexity of their needs.

Triage categories

South Australia’s metropolitan hospital EDs categorise patients by using the five-tier Australasian Triage Scale. Nurses and clinicians use the scale to assess each patient’s clinical urgency, based on their individual clinical needs.

The scale ranges from triage category one, which is applied to patients who need immediate care for life-threatening conditions, through to category five, which is applied to patients with conditions that are not urgent.

The triage category table on the Ambulance Service dashboard displays the current number of patients in a selected ED by:

  • triage category
  • the number of patients waiting to be seen (WTBS)
  • the number of patients being treated (BT)

Last 24 hour activity graph

The Last 24 Hour Activity graph shows the number of patients physically in each ED at the end of each hour in the previous 24-hour period.

The graph’s background shows the capacity colour codes used in the hospital status table and indicates the number of patient each hour who:

  • have commenced treatment (Com Treat)
  • are waiting to be seen (WTBS)
  • have arrived at the ED
  • have departed the ED.

Inpatient Gen Bed status

This table displays an up-to-date summary of all general inpatient beds across the metropolitan hospitals. It shows:

  • the number of patients who have been admitted and are waiting to be moved to an inpatient bed (WFB)
  • the total number of patient currently admitted to the hospital (Occ)
  • the total number of beds for the hospital (Base)

Available Specialty Beds and Capacity & Occupancy tables

The Available Specialty Beds table displays the actual number of beds available for each specialty area in each hospital.

The Capacity and Occupancy table displays the actual capacity and occupancy numbers for a subset of specially areas in each hospital.

Both of these tables can be toggled by clicking the ‘capacity and occupancy’ or ‘available beds’ buttons, which are located at the top left of each table.

System requirements

The Ambulance Service dashboard does not have any specific system requirements unless your browser version is greater than four years old.

From time to time, the dashboard may be unavailable due to unforeseen technical reasons or for scheduled system maintenance. If an error message is displayed, please try again at another time.