About HospitalWaits

Doctor Data Ltd is a UK healthcare data company founded by Mustafa Ghafouri (MBChB, MSc), a medically trained data scientist with 10+ years in healthcare data. We build evidence-based tools for patients, journalists, and NHS organisations to make better-informed decisions about UK healthcare.

HospitalWaits.co.uk is Doctor Data Ltd's first consumer product, launched 28 April 2026. An independent, medically informed comparison of NHS waiting times across England.

We have no affiliation with NHS England, NHS Digital, or any individual NHS trust. We are not funded by any healthcare provider. Our public commitments are documented in /editorial-policy + /sponsorship-policy.

5.6 million people are waiting for treatment in the 18 specialties this site covers. Under the NHS Constitution, patients referred for a first outpatient appointment with a consultant-led service have a legal right, with some exceptions, to choose which hospital they're referred to. But Healthwatch England says few people exercise this right — and those who try have no easy way to compare their options.

NHS England publishes detailed waiting time data every month for every hospital and specialty in England. But the raw data is locked in spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands of rows. HospitalWaits makes that data accessible — to patients, GPs, journalists, and anyone who wants to understand NHS waiting times.

• Waiting times for every NHS hospital by specialty, refreshed monthly from NHS England RTT data
• Distance from your postcode to each hospital, computed via PostGIS on real coordinates
• Trends — 12-month median wait per trust × specialty
• Right to Choose guidance — explained in plain English on every results page
• CQC ratings — the Care Quality Commission's own rating for an NHS trust, on the trust's page where CQC publishes one at trust level

This tool is built by Mustafa Ghafouri, who holds an MBChB (medical degree, Lancaster) and an MSc in Data Science (UCL), with over ten years of experience working with healthcare data — including roles at NHS Digital, the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency), AstraZeneca, Databricks (health and life sciences), and currently Pharmacy2U as Head of Data Science. He is an NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Fellow and Director of Doctor Data Ltd.

Note on credentials: Mustafa is medically trained but not currently in clinical practice and is not GMC-registered. He uses the substantive credentials he holds (MBChB, MSc, 10+ years of healthcare data work) rather than the “Dr” title, which by convention is reserved in healthcare contexts for GMC-registered practising clinicians. HospitalWaits is a decision-support tool, not clinical advice.

HospitalWaits is a Doctor Data Ltd product, built to make NHS waiting-time information easier for patients to use. It is not a product of any NHS organisation.

Thanks to Andrew Lee Ward, founder of Scorchsoft, a Birmingham app and AI development company, for early feedback on the site and for sharing the DataForSEO search-data tool he built.

The NHS and CQC source data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0; our compilation and derived figures are © Doctor Data Ltd. Currently displaying data through August 2026.

• Independent — not affiliated with or endorsed by NHS England, NHS Digital, or any NHS organisation
• Free for patients — and always will be
• Built on open data — every figure links to its source
• Transparent methodology — see /methodology

Mustafa Ghafouri (MBChB, MSc)
Director, Doctor Data Ltd
mustafa@doctor-data.co.uk

Journalists: I'm happy to provide data, charts, or commentary on NHS waiting times. Get in touch.