Where our waiting figures come from

The monthly consultant-led Referral to Treatment collection is our authoritative base. It counts people on incomplete pathways at each hospital trust, broken down by treatment function, and it is the source of the familiar 18-week standard.

It is accredited official statistics, published monthly, roughly six weeks after the month it describes. It tells you about a whole service in a past month. It does not contain anything about you, your position, or when you will be seen.

WLMDS gives fresher and more detailed views, including demographic breakdowns. NHS England publishes it as management information rather than accredited statistics, so we label it that way wherever it appears and never let it silently override the monthly RTT figures.

The monthly diagnostics collection covers 15 key tests and procedures. The standard here is six weeks, not eighteen. We use the source's own test names so the figures you see match the figures NHS England published.

NHS England sometimes reissues a month's data. We never overwrite an earlier release: each import is stored as its own version, the previous one is marked as superseded, and the trend lines use whichever release is current. That means our history stays auditable.

Small numbers are sometimes suppressed in the source to protect confidentiality, and some trusts do not report every month. We show a dash rather than a zero, and we never estimate a value to fill a gap.

A small number of measures — most obviously the Wait Pressure Index — are calculated by us from published inputs. They are clearly labelled as NHS Wait Helper analysis, the weights are published, and they are not NHS measures.

Hospital comparisons are ordered by published performance for the service you chose, then by distance. Nothing else influences the order. No provider can pay to appear higher, and we take no payment from providers at all.

Turning a service-level average into a personal prediction would be wrong far more often than it was right, and people make real decisions on these pages. We show what has been published and what you can do about it, and we stop there.

Independent providers doing NHS-funded work appear in the official data and in our comparisons, always labelled. Their case mix is usually narrower, which tends to flatter their waiting figures relative to a large acute trust.

If a figure or a statement here looks wrong, please tell us. We log every report, record what we changed, and keep the correction history.