Where our data comes from
Every waiting time on WaitSmart is either published by the NHS or reported by a real visitor -
we never estimate, model or invent a figure. This page lists every source we use, how each one
reaches us, and when it was last checked, so you can judge any number on this site for yourself.
358departments tracked
147with a live NHS-published source
43sources checked in the last hour
211powered by community reports
How we work
We collect waiting-time figures every 15 minutes, around the clock, from pages and feeds the
NHS has already made public. Where a department publishes nothing, we fall back on reports from
recent visitors and label them clearly with a community badge. Department labels such as A&E,
UTC and MIU are our interpretation of the source data and may not match a hospital’s own
terminology. WaitSmart is independent and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the NHS.
National and regional NHS services
Some parts of the UK publish waiting times centrally rather than on individual trust websites,
and for those areas we read the official service directly.
NHS trust websites
Most of our live figures come straight from the page each trust publishes on its own website -
the same numbers anyone can look up. The table shows exactly which page feeds each department
and when we last checked it.
Partner NHS data feeds
A number of trusts publish their live waits through NHS-commissioned apps and services rather
than their own websites. The figures still originate with the trust - they simply reach us
through a partner data feed.
Community reports
211 of the departments we track have no published live feed at all. For those,
waiting times come from people who were recently there, are marked with a community badge wherever
they appear, and update whenever a new visitor submits their wait. It is an honest second-best:
clearly labelled, never mixed in with official figures.
Official NHS performance figures
The “Official NHS performance” panel on English hospital pages comes from
NHS England’s
monthly A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions collection, published as provider-level data
each month. Alongside it we show the latest
Friends and Family Test
result — the NHS’s own monthly patient-experience survey — wherever at least 30 patients responded.
Welsh hospital pages carry the equivalent panel from
StatsWales, published monthly by
Digital Health and Care Wales. Wales reports site by site and against 4, 8 and 12 hour thresholds,
so those panels show this detail.
Scottish pages use
Public Health Scotland’s open data,
which publishes A&E activity and four-hour performance weekly and site by site — the most
frequent official reporting anywhere in the UK. The hospital list itself, including each site’s
official department classification, comes from the same source. Scotland has no live hospital
waiting-time feeds, so current waits on those pages come from visitor reports.
Two things worth knowing about the English numbers. Most trusts report for the organisation as a whole
rather than site by site, so unless a unit files its own return the figures cover every comparable
department that trust runs — the panel always says which it is showing. Northern Ireland publishes
its emergency-care statistics as quarterly PDF documents rather than data files, so NI pages carry no
performance panel yet; Scotland is outside our current coverage.
Everything else on a hospital page
- Care Quality Commission - ratings, inspection dates and report links come from the independent regulator at cqc.org.uk (England only). Where the CQC has rated a hospital’s urgent and emergency services as a service in their own right, we show that alongside the site-wide rating, because it is the more relevant of the two on an A&E page. CQC ratings stay in force until the service is re-inspected, so we always print the inspection date — many currently-standing ratings are several years old.
- NHS Organisation Data Service - the official organisation and site codes we use to match hospitals to national datasets.
- NHS trust websites - opening hours, departments, contact details and service notes.
- Google business profiles - photographs and contact details.
- WaitSmart visitor surveys - the visitor feedback shown on hospital pages aggregates our own surveys from the last six months, and we only cite a figure once a question has at least five responses.
Spotted a problem?
If a figure looks wrong, a source has moved, or we have mislabelled a department,
tell us and we will put it right.