About Know Your Wait

Why we built this

NHS waiting-time statistics are public, but spread across separate government and NHS websites in each nation. They are usually presented for administrative performance reporting rather than for patients. Know Your Wait republishes official figures with clear explanations so people referred for planned NHS care can understand what the figures mean and what patient rights apply to them.

Our principles

• Never compare across nations: each publishing nation's figures are shown separately under its own definitions and rules.
• Snapshots, not predictions: figures describe people already on waiting lists at a specific reporting period, never an individual forecast.
• Official or exact sums only: we republish official figures as released by official bodies, or exact sums of published bands. We never estimate or interpolate.
• No ranking or nudging: we never sort hospital trusts or health boards by waiting time.
• Independent: we are completely independent of the NHS and government. We do not sell healthcare, private insurance, or referrals.

Open source and open data

The entire project is open source. You can inspect our code, data pipeline, and normalised data in our public repository.

• View source code on GitHub
• Browse normalised data directory on GitHub