Victorians are waiting four years or more to see specialists in public hospitals, according to this report.

Introduction
The Department of Health and Human Services has been working with health services to implement a
patient level data collection for specialist clinics in Victoria. Specialist clinics were introduced into the
Victorian Integrated Non-Admitted Health (VINAH) Minimum Dataset from 1 July 2012 following
extensive work on the part of health services and the Department to establish the necessary
infrastructure and reporting capability.

This work is ongoing and inherently challenging, particularly for health services with the largest volumes
of specialist clinic records to process and complex systems to modify. Implementation of VINAH has
therefore progressed to a variable extent across health services and across clinics within each health
service.

Consequently, this report presents data for only a subset of health services and specialties. Although the
health services included in this report have progressed well in implementing standardised data collection
for specialist clinics, activity and wait times reported here may be based on incomplete data and results
should be interpreted with caution. The completeness and accuracy of specialist clinic data will improve
over time.

It should be noted that a pilot audit program of specialist clinics data was undertaken at selected health
services in 2014–15. The Department of Health and Human Services is expected to commission an
independent audit program in 2015–16 to assess the integrity of VINAH data.

As VINAH data improve over time, this collection will enable public reporting of a range of activity and
performance data on specialist clinics in public hospitals, and will improve management through a better
understanding of this component of the system.

This report is based on preliminary data. Quarterly reports will be republished with refreshed data
following annual consolidation of the VINAH collection.