About Our Bot
If you're seeing requests from WaitSmart/1.0 in your server logs, this page explains who we are, what we're doing, and how to get in touch if you have any questions or concerns.
What WaitSmart Does
WaitSmart is a free public service that aggregates live A&E and urgent care waiting times from NHS hospital trust websites across the UK. We present this publicly available information in a consistent, accessible format so patients can make informed decisions about where to seek emergency or urgent care.
How Our Bot Works
Our bot periodically visits publicly accessible pages on NHS trust websites to read the current displayed waiting times. It identifies itself with the following user agent string:
User-Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; WaitSmart/1.0; +https://waitsmart.co.uk)
We respect robots.txt
Our bot honours robots.txt directives. If you block WaitSmart in your robots.txt, we will stop crawling your site.
Low request volume
We only request the specific pages that display waiting times. We do not crawl entire sites, follow links, or index content beyond what we need.
Reasonable intervals
We check each page at sensible intervals throughout the day. We do not send rapid or excessive requests and we implement rate limiting on our end.
Publicly available data only
We only read data that is already published openly on trust websites for patient use. We do not access private systems, APIs, or authenticated areas.
What We Collect
From each visit, we typically record:
- The current displayed waiting time (e.g. "2 hours 15 minutes")
- The number of patients waiting, if published
- The timestamp of our reading
We do not collect personal data, cookies, session tokens, or any information beyond what is shown on the public-facing page. We do not submit forms, execute JavaScript interactively, or interact with your site beyond reading the relevant page content.
Blocking Our Bot
If you would prefer that we do not access your website, you can block our bot using your robots.txt file:
robots.txt
User-agent: WaitSmart
Disallow: /
We will honour this directive and stop accessing your site. Alternatively, you can contact us directly and we will remove your site from our collection schedule immediately.
Working With Us
If you manage an NHS trust website and would like to work with us rather than block us, we would welcome the conversation. We can adjust our collection approach, use an official data feed or API, or simply ensure that the information we display about your trust is accurate and up to date.
See our partnership page for more details on how we work with trusts.