Changelog
What's new
Features, articles, and monthly RTT data updates shipped on HospitalWaits.
- Feature
Waiting times by region
Every specialty now has a page for each region of England — e.g. cardiology in London, or gynaecology in the North — ranking just the NHS trusts in that area by shortest wait. Regions with only a handful of trusts are left out so no page is thin. Reachable from each national specialty page and built to be found by search.
- Content
New guide: your GP referral and 'Advice & Guidance'
From April 2026 many GP referrals in England are routed through Advice & Guidance first — the GP asks a hospital specialist for advice before, or instead of, a formal referral. A new plain-English guide explains what that means (it's not a rejection), your rights, and how to compare waiting times and use Right to Choose once you are referred. Also: a Welsh or Scottish postcode search now jumps straight to your own health board instead of the all-boards list.
- Feature
Site-wide usability, accessibility and accuracy pass
A broad review-led improvement pass. Wales, Guides and the Glossary are now linked from every page footer (they were reachable only via the menu before). The homepage search button always works and tells you what's missing instead of sitting greyed out. On phones the navigation no longer overflows the screen. CQC rating badges and small print now meet accessibility contrast standards. Every waiting-time definition now spells out that a median is the wait so far of people still on the list, not how long a new referral will ultimately wait. Two private hospitals that were mislabelled as NHS are now correctly marked independent. Coming from a search result, trust pages now offer a one-click way back to your list.
- Data
Wales coverage launches
HospitalWaits now covers England, Scotland and Wales. New /wales hub plus a page for each of the seven Welsh local health boards: median and 90th-centile waits by specialty, 25 months of history, refreshed monthly from StatsWales open data. Welsh postcodes searched on the England tool now route to the Welsh figures instead of a dead end. Every figure links to its Welsh Government source; the methodology page explains why Welsh open pathways are not comparable with England's RTT.
- Content
NHS dentist waiting list — the honest guide
New guide answering one of the most-searched NHS questions: there is no NHS dentist waiting list, and this page explains why — plus the routes that do exist (Find-a-dentist, NHS 111 urgent dental care, and the hospital oral-surgery waits we do compare).
- Feature
Clearer navigation and a more coherent site
Talking Therapies joins A&E as a top-level tab. The already-on-a-waiting-list link now opens the GP letter in switching mode. One shared 'fastest' rule across all comparison surfaces so pages can never disagree with themselves. Retired postcodes (like CF10 3NY) now resolve instead of erroring. Scotland gains the '9 in 10 within' column, board trend tables extend to 25 months, and each nation's page links the others.
- Content
10 /insights article drafts published
Right to Choose vs private; Do I have PMI cover?; What private surgery actually costs; Self-pay diagnostics; What to ask a private hospital; How to read NHS RTT data; What to do when your op is cancelled; Why NHS waits are long; When private makes sense; Welcome to Insights. Medically informed, source-cited.
- Feature
Decision-support panel + GP-letter generator
Every trust × specialty page now includes a 'What this means for you' panel with ranked actions (Right to Choose first, PMI second, self-pay third), the new Doctor Data Wait Score™ badge, and a one-click GP-letter generator pre-filled with your trust + specialty. Patients now leave the page with a concrete next action.
- Feature
Sticky Right-to-Choose CTA + Share-with-Family
Persistent action bar appears 5s after page load on every trust × specialty page — one-click GP-letter generation, dismissible. Plus a Share-with-Family component (WhatsApp / email / copy link / Web Share API) so patients can talk options through with their partner or carer.
- Content
/insights editorial section live
Medically informed analysis section launched with RSS feed at /feed.xml, MedicalScholarlyArticle + Person schema for E-E-A-T, MDX-powered articles by Mustafa Ghafouri (MBChB, MSc).
- Content
Editorial + sponsorship policies published
/editorial-policy and /sponsorship-policy now publicly document our review process, correction policy, and disclosure standards — covering the Tier 4 sponsored-placement framework that opens later this year.
- Infrastructure
Phase 0 SEO foundations
6 security headers (HSTS, CSP, X-Frame, X-Content-Type, Referrer, Permissions); canonical tags on every public route; AI-crawler allow-list (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot etc); /llms.txt; PWA manifest; /trusts A-Z directory page; CI workflow; pre-commit Integrity hook.
- Feature
HospitalWaits launched
Public launch at hospitalwaits.co.uk. 538 NHS trusts, 18 specialties, 17 months of RTT data. Built solo by Mustafa Ghafouri (MBChB, MSc) over 4 sprint days.