NHS - Waiting Times
Updated: 11:00 - 6th February 2007
There are two aspects to waiting times. a) What is the waiting time now? b) How have the Hospitals/PCT's performed over past months/years, improved or become worse?
a) What is the Waiting Time now?
From an ease of use and data availability point of view the best way to find out 'what the waiting time now' is for us to provide a link to the NHS web site where they have all available data and a search engine that assists you to find the 'waiting time now' for any type of treatment (Breast Surgery, Pediatrics, or Urology to name a few) as an Outpatient, Day Patient or In-Patient. You are also able to perform a similar search against a combination of Consultant, Trust and/or Specialty.
Before using the search engine, we advise you to read the 'What the Waiting Times Tell You' page, this will provide you with quite a bit of background information and importantly what the 'Waiting Times' will not tell you.
So if you are ready, you can now go over to the NHS Waiting Time search page.
We would be interested to hear your experience about using this tool so that we can post this information on this web site and on our Blog.
b) Past performance Waiting Times.
Once you've used the above search for the current waiting times, you may be interested to look at how the Trust has performed over past months/years. We have looked into the best way to track past NHS waiting times and have decided to take an approach whereby we will link the entries already in the table below to data located on the Department of Health (DOH) web site. This will resolve an enormous logistical issue for us and of course as the data at the DOH web site is always being updated, this will also help us in updating this web site.
First, some explanation about the figures, they are all for past waiting times in the period Q4 2005/2006 - which is 1st January to 1st April 2006. The DOH presents this data on their web site in a number of different ways (Strategic Health Authority [SHA], Primary Care Trust [PCT] or Hospital Trust) to web site visitors. Using the same basic layout as used on other pages on this web site, the first column to the right of the Hospital Trust name will link to Hospital Trust figures and the right hand column will link to the PCT figures to which that Hospital Trust belongs.
In the Trust Figures column [1] covers waiting lists and waiting times for first outpatient appointments at the relevant NHS Trust, and [2] represents Inpatient waiting list statistics at the relevant NHS Trust. based.
In the PCT Figures column [1] covers waiting lists and waiting times for first outpatient appointments at the relevant PCT, and [2] represents Inpatient waiting list statistics at the relevant PCT.
Finally, we do not as yet have an entry on this page for all NHS trusts, so if your Trust is not listed you can go to a DOH page where you will find an ABC bar like the one below that will allow you to find the relevant trust.
We hope that you find this new page on the NHS Watch web site useful, please let us know if you have any comments/suggestions etc. and of course what you think about the figures.
Please feel free to link to this page, but please send us an email to let us know who you are. Visit our new NHS Watch Blog for additional comments.
Use the ABC bar below to locate your Trust/Hospital in the full list. You can also visit the individual Trust/Hospital web site by clicking on the individual Trust/Hospital name.