NHS respiratory medicine waiting times: how long, and how to be seen faster

Before anything about waiting lists, the safety point. Some breathing symptoms must not wait for a routine referral:

• Call 999 now for sudden, severe breathlessness where you cannot complete a full sentence, lips or face turning blue, or chest pain. That is a medical emergency, not a clinic question.
• Coughing up blood needs an urgent GP appointment. It should not sit on a routine list — your GP may refer you on the two-week-wait suspected-cancer pathway, which is deliberately much faster than the ordinary outpatient queue.

Everything else on this page is about planned, non-urgent respiratory referrals — the standard outpatient wait to see a lung specialist for a problem that is not an emergency. If your symptoms are getting rapidly worse, that is not a waiting-list question: get seen the same day.

People search for “the” respiratory waiting time as if there is one number. There is not. The wait is set by the individual NHS trust your referral lands at, and the spread between trusts is large. For the same kind of clinic appointment, one hospital's wait can be several times another's, often for hospitals within easy travelling distance of each other.

Because these figures move every month, the useful thing is to look up your own area rather than trust a number in an article. You can see every English trust's current respiratory medicine wait, ranked shortest first:

Compare respiratory (lung) waits by hospital

Most respiratory problems follow the same broad route: GP first, then — if needed — a specialist outpatient appointment, and often an investigation such as a breathing (lung function) test, a chest X-ray, a CT scan or a sleep study. What sends people down this path varies:

• Asthma — usually managed by the GP practice; referred to a specialist when the diagnosis is uncertain, control is poor despite treatment, or specialist therapies are being considered.
• COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) — also largely managed in primary care, with referral for diagnostic doubt, frequent flare-ups, or assessment for oxygen or pulmonary rehabilitation.
• Suspected obstructive sleep apnoea — loud snoring, pauses in breathing overnight and daytime sleepiness are investigated with a sleep study, often done at home.
• Breathlessness investigation — because breathlessness can be lung- or heart-related, it often means several tests (lung function, a chest X-ray or scan, sometimes a heart trace) to find the cause.
• Chronic cough — a cough lasting more than about eight weeks is worked up to find the cause, which may be asthma, reflux, post-nasal drip or a medication side effect.
• Bronchiectasis — repeated chest infections with a persistent phlegmy cough; a CT scan of the chest is central to confirming it.
• Interstitial lung disease (ILD) — scarring or inflammation of the lung tissue causing breathlessness and cough; a high-resolution CT scan and specialist assessment are key.

The thread running through several of these is imaging. Many respiratory referrals — bronchiectasis, ILD, unexplained breathlessness, a shadow on a chest X-ray — need a CT scan, and that wait varies between hospitals too:

Compare NHS CT scan waiting times

For suspected sleep apnoea specifically, the key test is an overnight sleep study — you can compare those waits separately:

Compare NHS sleep study waiting times

This is the part most patients are never told. In England you have a legal right, at the point your GP refers you, to choose which hospital or clinic your planned respiratory outpatient appointment is at — and that includes choosing one with a shorter waiting list. It is called the NHS Right to Choose, and it costs nothing.

In practice, most referrals go to the nearest chest clinic by default, even when somewhere nearby is seeing people far sooner. If you would rather be seen faster, you can ask. (This applies to planned, non-urgent referrals — not to urgent or two-week-wait cancer referrals, which are routed to keep them fast.) The site even drafts the letter to take to your GP:

How the Right to Choose works

Generate a Right-to-Choose letter for your GP

1. Look up the current respiratory waits near you on the respiratory medicine ranking — see every hospital ranked by wait, then judge it against distance from you.
2. Weigh a shorter wait against travel. Follow-up appointments and any ongoing tests happen at that hospital too, so a much further clinic is a real trade-off. Talk it through with your GP.
3. If a faster hospital suits you, ask your GP to refer you there under Right to Choose. Take the drafted letter with you.

Some people decide to pay for a private respiratory appointment to avoid a long wait, and for some that is the right call — a number of patients also have private medical insurance through work that they had forgotten covers it. If you are weighing that up, it is worth doing it with clear eyes: a self-pay specialist consultation is one cost, but any scans, breathing tests or a sleep study on top add up, so ask providers for the full picture rather than the headline consultation fee.

One thing worth checking first, though: whether a faster NHS clinic is actually available to you under your Right to Choose. Many people pay for a wait they could have shortened for free. The comparison tool shows the NHS options, so you can make the decision knowing what the free route would have got you. Going private is one route among several — not the only way to be seen sooner.

How long is the NHS wait to see a respiratory (lung) specialist?

There is no single national number, and that is the important part. The wait for a respiratory medicine outpatient appointment is set by the individual NHS trust your GP refers you to, and those waits vary widely — the slowest trusts can be several times slower than the fastest ones a similar distance away. Because the figure changes every month, the honest answer is to look up your own area: the trust-by-trust wait for respiratory medicine is published on hospitalwaits.co.uk/national/respiratory-medicine. Remember this is the planned, non-urgent clinic wait — anything acute is handled on a different, faster footing.

When is breathlessness or a cough an emergency rather than something to wait for?

Some breathing symptoms should never wait for a routine referral. Sudden severe breathlessness where you cannot complete a full sentence, lips or face turning blue, or chest pain is a medical emergency — call 999. Coughing up blood should be seen urgently by your GP, not left on a routine list; your GP may refer you on the two-week-wait suspected-cancer pathway, which is deliberately much faster than the ordinary outpatient queue. The waiting times on this page are for planned, non-urgent respiratory referrals only. If your symptoms are getting rapidly worse, that is not a waiting-list question — get seen the same day.

Can I choose which hospital I'm referred to for a lung problem?

Yes, for a planned, non-urgent referral. In England you have a legal right, at the point your GP refers you, to choose which hospital or clinic your respiratory outpatient appointment is at — including one with a shorter waiting list. This is the NHS 'Right to Choose'. Most patients are never told about it and simply go to their nearest chest clinic by default, even when a hospital a short drive away is seeing people sooner. It does not apply to urgent or two-week-wait cancer referrals, which are routed to keep them fast.

I've been referred for suspected sleep apnoea — how does that work, and can I speed it up?

Suspected obstructive sleep apnoea — usually prompted by loud snoring, pauses in breathing overnight and daytime sleepiness — is investigated with a sleep study, often using equipment you take home for a night rather than an overnight stay. The wait for a sleep study also varies between hospitals, and you can compare those waits on hospitalwaits.co.uk/diagnostics/sleep-study. If a diagnosis is confirmed, treatment such as CPAP is arranged through the respiratory or sleep service. As with any planned referral, it is worth checking whether a nearer service has a shorter wait before you settle for the default.

Everything on HospitalWaits comes from NHS England's own monthly Referral-to-Treatment data, and every figure links to its NHS source so you can check it. The methodology, including the known limitations, is public. Nothing here is medical advice — the site surfaces the published waiting-time data so you and your GP can use it, and the safety points above are general information, not a substitute for being assessed.