A hospital is one of the few things in this database where the approval process is genuinely not the main source of elapsed time. Between a decision that a hospital is needed and a patient being treated in it, the great majority of the calendar is design, procurement, construction and commissioning -- real work, correctly sequenced, on a building that has to function on the day it opens.

That should be said plainly on a site about red tape, because the honest finding here is smaller than the rhetoric usually is.

What the database can still isolate is the front end: the sequence from service plan through business case, assurance gates and budget decision to the point where design can actually start. That sequence is mostly documentation and approval, it is measured in years rather than months, and a meaningful share of it is scheduling -- specifically, waiting for the annual budget cycle. See Deliver a new public hospital — New South Wales.