New NHS data tracker lets patients check local wait times, A&E delays and ambulance response figures

A new online tracker produced by the Daily Mail allows patients in England to see how many people are waiting for treatment at local NHS trusts, how long A&E patients are waiting and regional ambulance response times by entering the first half of their postcode.

The tool, which draws on monthly performance figures published by NHS England, covers more than 120 hospital trusts and reports measures including the share of Type 1 A&E attendances seen within four hours, 12‑hour waits, performance against three cancer targets and backlogs for routine procedures such as hip and knee replacements. NHS national medical director Sir Stephen Powis described the tracker as "an important tool where patients in England can access data about their local hospital at the touch of a button."

The Mail’s data journalism team said ambulance response times are plotted using regionally recorded figures and that each hospital trust has been aligned to its regional ambulance service for display. The dataset underlying the tracker was updated on Sept. 15, 2025, the publisher said.

The tracker presents data sourced directly from NHS England’s monthly performance statistics and applies a set of rules to match trusts to users’ postcodes. Trusts are displayed within a 15‑mile radius for outer London postcodes and a 3‑mile radius for inner London postcodes. Users are asked to enter only the first half of their postcode; search results return trusts in alphabetical order, which may not always place the closest trust at the top of the list, the team warned. Private providers and some community-based trusts have been excluded from the search results.

Under NHS rules cited in the tracker, patients who need treatment are generally entitled to be seen within 18 weeks; the tracker also exposes the extent of elective care backlogs under that benchmark. For analysis of four‑hour A&E waits, the tracker uses only Type 1 attendances, which are visits to typical consultant-led emergency departments. When reporting 12‑hour waits, the platform includes all types of A&E attendances, including Type 2 speciality emergency departments, consistent with the way NHS data are recorded.

Sir Stephen Powis said the service had never been busier heading into winter and that staff were working to manage pressures. He added that plans were in place to manage extra demand and that a new elective care reform plan aims to improve waiting times. He said the NHS was working with the government on a 10‑year health plan and invited ideas from the public via the Change.nhs.uk conversation.

The tracker is intended to give members of the public a local view of performance against national targets, though the publisher and NHS England emphasise caveats about how data are collected and presented. Ambulance response measures are recorded and published at regional level rather than by individual trust, meaning response-time figures shown alongside a specific trust reflect performance across a wider geography. The reliance on Type 1 attendances for four‑hour analyses means performance for specialised A&E services will be handled differently in the tracker’s 12‑hour metrics.

Health service performance monitoring has grown more prominent amid sustained pressure on emergency departments and rising waits for elective procedures. NHS England’s monthly statistics provide the raw figures used by analysts and journalists to monitor trends, and publishers have increasingly used interactive tools to present those figures to the public. The Daily Mail said its postcode search tool, which it described as the "ultimate NHS data tracker," was designed to make official statistics more accessible to readers.

The tracker’s methodology and limitations are set out on the site, and users seeking specific clinical advice were urged to contact their local NHS services directly. The publisher said it had matched trusts to postcodes based on distance and that data for the tracker are taken from the official NHS monthly returns. Statistics were last updated on Sept. 15, 2025.