31 July 2026 · 2 min read
Two free NHS waiting-times explorers, from a GP's desk
NHS England publishes elective and diagnostic waiting times every month. The raw data is open — the tools around it are not. So I've built two free explorers and put them on this site.
Dr Jez McCole
UK GP · Founder, Kairos Medical Informatics
What's there
- RTT explorer — pick an Integrated Care Board, see waits by specialty: median, 92nd-percentile, and 18-week / 52-week breach counts. Colour-coded against the 18-week constitutional standard.
- DM01 explorer — pick a hospital provider, see waits for every diagnostic modality it reports (MRI, CT, echo, endoscopy and eleven others), with 6/13/26-week breach counts.
Who it's for
GPs choosing between providers when a patient asks “which is quickest?”. Commissioners wanting a quick read on their ICB without wrestling a spreadsheet. Patients trying to make sense of their referral. Researchers looking for a first-pass filter before dropping into the raw NHS extracts.
What it isn't
It's not real-time. NHS England publishes each month's figures about six to eight weeks after the reporting period ends, so a lag is baked in. It isn't a substitute for the raw datasets — the tool links out to them for anyone who wants to check working. And it doesn't store anything about you: there's no login, no tracking, no analytics beacon.
How it stays fresh
When NHS England publishes a new month, I run one script and commit the updated JSON to the site's repository. That's the whole refresh. No database, no ETL job, no scheduled function — just static files served from the same host as the rest of the site.
Why free
Because it's public data, and because tools like this genuinely change what GPs and their patients can find out in a two-minute conversation. If it's useful and you want it better, tell me what to add — I'll iterate.