Where every number comes from
This site mixes two very different kinds of data. We label them separately everywhere, and we never blend them into a single unlabelled figure.
1. Crowd-reported waits
Waits submitted by members of the public through the report form. A report records: the department, how long the person waited to be first seen, optionally the total time in the department, a broad reason for attending, and optionally an age band.
- Reports are anonymous. We don't ask for a name, an email or a date of birth.
- We do not ask for medical details and we ask people not to include staff names.
- Reports are unverified. Anyone can submit one. We show median and range rather than a mean, so a single wild entry moves the headline less.
- One report is one report. We don't inflate the count, and we show the number of reports behind every figure so you can judge how thin it is.
- Recent reports carry more weight than older ones in the estimate. Anything older than 7 days counts for less; we compare last 30 days in the tables.
2. Live trust feeds
Some NHS trusts publish their own live A&E waiting-time dashboard, refreshed every 10 to 15 minutes. Where a trust does that, we read the same public page any member of the public can open, take the figure the trust itself published, and link back to it.
- We show the trust's own "last updated" time where the page provides one, not our fetch time.
- We do not model, smooth or invent a live figure. If a trust publishes nothing, there is no live figure for it.
- Coverage is a minority of departments — most trusts don't publish one.
Live feeds currently read: Mid Cheshire Hospitals, Sandwell and West Birmingham, University Hospitals Plymouth, North Cheshire and Mersey, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire.
3. Official published statistics
For every department we hold the most recent official performance figure. This is authoritative but lagged — it describes a past calendar month, not tonight.
How the "expected wait" is calculated
When you compare hospitals, each department gets an expected wait built from up to three inputs, each with a weight reflecting how much it should count:
- Crowd reports (weight rises with the number of reports) — median of reports in the last 7 days where available.
- Live feed (weight 0.95) — the trust's own current figure, where it publishes one. Essentially authoritative for "right now".
- Official monthly (weight 0.30) — converted from the share seen within 4 hours into an implied typical wait. This anchors the estimate where no recent reports exist, and never dominates when they do.
The blended figure is then adjusted for what you're there for, because the same queue produces very different waits:
| Reason for attending | Typical effect versus the queue average |
|---|---|
| Suspected stroke / sudden weakness | Seen on arrival — the queue barely applies |
| Chest pain or breathing difficulty | Fast-tracked — much shorter than the queue |
| Minor injury or illness | Somewhat shorter — often a better fit for an MIU or UTC |
| Urgent, not life-threatening | Around the queue average, usually a little longer |
| Mental health crisis | Often longer — waits in a separate space, not a separate queue |
Ranking adds roughly 4 minutes of travel per kilometre (capped at 90 minutes) and, on top of that, a proximity preference: each 5 km beyond the nearest department costs about 20 minutes. So a department 20 km further away needs to be roughly two and a half hours faster to be recommended over the one down the road. That is deliberate. The official figure is a monthly average for a whole department, often weeks old, and it is a weak signal about what awaits you tonight — distance is a fact. Your nearest general A&E department is always shown in the results, even where we estimate it to be slower, so you can see the local option and judge for yourself. Departments more than 25 km away are only suggested when they appear to save at least 90 minutes, which would suggest a genuinely struggling local unit rather than normal variation.
How the location check works
A postcode is converted to coordinates using postcodes.io, which serves ONS data. Your postcode is sent to that service to be looked up; we do not store it, and it is not linked to anything else on this site. If you use "use my location" instead, your browser's coordinates are used directly and no postcode lookup happens at all.
Straight-line distance is then calculated to every department, so the distance shown is "as the crow flies" rather than a driving route — a river, estuary or motorway junction can make the real journey longer than the number suggests. If a postcode cannot be found, or does not look like a valid UK postcode, the site says so explicitly rather than returning an empty list.
Are all A&E departments the same?
The unit we compare is the hospital site
Each of the 220 records in this database is a hospital site with an emergency department — not an individual ward or unit inside a building. The site is the unit the official statistics are published against, and the unit you would travel to.
- Most sites appear once. A handful share a postcode with another hospital — the Oxford Road campus in Manchester has three hospitals on one postcode, and the Royal Sussex County and Royal Alexandra children's hospitals share one in Brighton. They are listed separately because they are different hospitals, with their own names, their own doors and their own queues.
- We record what kind of site each one is. Most of the 220 are major emergency departments taking any emergency at any age, but the list also includes children's hospitals and a small number of specialist sites such as eye casualty.
- Two hospitals can share a name. There is a Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Lewisham and another in Gateshead — they are different hospitals under different trusts.
So a hospital with a badly performing A&E is not a badly performing hospital. The figure here is that site's emergency performance, and says nothing about its maternity, cancer or surgical care. Use the fastest-A&E checker when you are choosing where to go, and the hospital names when you are working out which one someone means.
No — and this matters more than the waiting times do. Most of the 220 hospitals in this database are general (Type 1) emergency departments, which take any emergency, any age. A minority are not general alternatives, and going to the wrong one can mean being redirected or waiting to be transferred.
| Type | Who it takes | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| General A&E (206 sites) | Anyone, any age | The default choice. Treat this as the only place that is guaranteed to see you. |
| Children's A&E (6 sites) | Usually under 16 only | Often better for a child — staffed and equipped for them. But age limits are enforced: several are strictly under 16, and a 16-year-old may be sent to the general department next door. |
| Specialist (8 sites) | Eyes, dental | Emergency eye and dental services. Whether you should go straight here, or to a general A&E, varies by trust — some take walk-ins, others want you referred or sent via 111. |
These units are shown in the directory, where you can filter by type, but they are deliberately excluded from the "fastest near you" comparison: a short wait at an eye hospital is meaningless if your problem is a suspected fracture.
This site cannot make that call for you. It does not know your symptoms, and a waiting-time comparison is not a clinical judgement. If someone is seriously ill or injured, call 999 — or go to the nearest department, whichever that is. Never travel past a nearer A&E in an emergency because this site estimated a shorter wait at one further away.
What this site is not
This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the NHS, NHS England, NHS Scotland, any NHS trust, or any health board. Official figures are reproduced with their period and source shown. Crowd reports are the accounts of members of the public and have not been verified against any hospital record.
Known gaps
- Wales and Northern Ireland publish on different cycles and are not yet in the database. Coverage is England and Scotland only.
- Live feeds cover a minority of departments. Most of the country shows an official figure that is up to a month old.
- Report volumes will be low at first. Every department page shows how many reports sit behind its median, so you can see whether to trust it.
- Definitions differ between nations. Scotland publishes Type 1 departments on a different basis to England's ECDS metric, so cross-nation comparisons are not like-for-like.
League table
Every general A&E department is ranked on the league table by the proportion of patients seen within four hours, with twelve-hour waits shown alongside. Two things about it are deliberate:
- A minimum of 2,500 monthly attendances. Below that, a percentage computed from a few hundred patients swings wildly and would misname a hospital. Smaller units stay listed in all hospitals but are not ranked.
- Two measures, shown together. The four-hour and twelve-hour figures often disagree. A department can be slow for most people yet rarely leave anyone twelve hours, or be about average while repeatedly leaving its sickest patients waiting half a day. Showing only one would hide that.
A ranking is not a rating. It does not measure quality of care, does not account for the case mix a department receives, and says nothing about your own condition.
Open data
The hospital dataset is available as JSON, including provenance fields on every record:
- /api/hospitals — all departments with coordinates, official performance, period and source
- /api/hospitals?lat=…&lon=…&condition=… — ranked by expected wait near a point
- /api/reports — aggregated crowd report statistics, no personal data