Editorial policy & standards

This policy applies to all content published on aewaittime.co.uk — wait-time figures, hospital pages, region pages, evergreen guides and policy pages alike. It is the rulebook the editorial team operates by and the contract we make with readers.

Every wait-time figure on the site is collected from a publicly available NHS Trust web page disclosed on our data sources page. We do not generate, model, predict or estimate wait times ourselves.

• Primary sources only. We collect directly from each NHS Trust’s own public web page. We do not republish from third-party aggregators or scrapers of scrapers.

• Source linked on every figure. Every wait number on the site links out to the original NHS Trust page so readers can verify it themselves.

• Source-page timestamp shown. The freshness badge always reflects the trust’s own publication time, not the time we re-read or rendered the page.

• No compositing without disclosure. We do not blend numbers from multiple sources into a single figure without an explicit label saying we have done so.

Every editorial change to the site — from a new hospital page to a tweak in a single piece of evergreen copy — goes through the same lightweight workflow.

1. Source check. Every claim in editorial copy must trace to a primary source. The author logs the source URL with the draft.
2. Editor review. A second member of the editorial team reads the draft, opens every cited source, and verifies that the cited claim is actually supported by the source.
3. Risk assessment. If the page contains anything that could materially influence a reader's decision to seek emergency care, the page is escalated for a 999/NHS-111 signposting check before publication.
4. Publish & date. The page is published with a 'Last reviewed' date stamped from the editor sign-off — never auto-generated from build time.

If something on this site is wrong, we want to know. Material corrections are dated and listed on the methodology change log so the record of what changed and when is always public.

• Acknowledge

  ≤ 2 working days

• Resolve or explain

  ≤ 5 working days

• Formal complaint reply

  ≤ 10 working days

• No silent edits. We do not retroactively edit a wait number, hospital fact or policy claim without a public, dated change-log entry.

• Acknowledge fast. We aim to acknowledge all reader-reported corrections within 2 working days of receipt.

• Fix or explain within 5 working days. Either we publish a correction within 5 working days, or we publish a transparent explanation of what we are still investigating.

• Retract on factual error. If a piece of content turns out to be materially wrong and cannot be salvaged with a correction, we retract it — with a notice in its place explaining what was wrong and why.

A&E Wait Time is independently funded by the founder. We have a small set of rules to keep that independence visible.

• No paid placements. We do not accept payment from NHS Trusts, hospitals, ICBs, health boards or any other entity in exchange for inclusion, ranking or favourable copy.

• No advertorial without labelling. If we ever publish sponsored content, it will be clearly labelled as such at the top of the page and excluded from the live waiting-time directory.

• No NHS funding. We receive no funding from the NHS or its constituent bodies. We have no commercial relationship with any of them.

• No affiliate links on data pages. Hospital, region and directory pages contain no affiliate or commercial outbound links.

Editorial team members must declare any current employment, contractual, consulting or family relationship with an NHS Trust, ICB, health board, medical device or pharmaceutical company at the point they join the team and again at every quarterly review.

• Cite primary sources. When we quote or summarise an NHS publication, NHS Trust statement or external research paper, we link to the original and credit the publisher.

• No verbatim copying. We do not copy substantial passages from other publications. Editorial summaries are written in our own words.

• Source attribution on every figure. Where we display a wait-time figure collected from an NHS Trust web page, we name the trust and link to the original source so the reader can verify.

Evergreen pages (about, methodology, this policy, every region and guide page) are re-read by a member of the editorial team every 90 days at minimum. The “Last reviewed” date on each page is only bumped when the content has been re-checked — we do not auto-stamp.

Wait-time data ingestion runs continuously; pages re-render within 15 minutes of each underlying NHS publication. See methodology § refresh cadence for the full breakdown.

If you are not happy with how we have handled a correction, a piece of editorial content, or any other matter, please tell us. We aim to provide a substantive response to every formal complaint within 10 working days.

We follow UK consumer-protection, data-protection and advertising standards.

• UK GDPR & Data Protection Act 2018. Reader data is handled per our privacy policy. We do not sell, share or license user-level data.

• Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. We do not make misleading claims about our affiliations, accreditations or the accuracy of figures.

• CAP / ASA non-broadcast code. We follow the Committee of Advertising Practice's UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising on health-adjacent claims, even though we run no advertising.

• Medical Act 1983. We do not represent ourselves as registered medical practitioners and do not provide medical advice.