How we collect & classify A&E waiting times
A&E Wait Time is an independent aggregator of public NHS data. This page discloses every source we use, how frequently each one is updated, and the honest limitations of that data — so you can decide for yourself how much weight to give any number on this site.
In short
- We collect waiting-time figures from publicly available NHS Trust web pages — the same pages anyone can visit themselves.
- We only display data the trust has already published. We do not generate, model, predict or estimate wait times.
- Every wait number on the site links back to the original NHS Trust page so you can verify it for yourself.
- We are an independent third-party site. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the NHS, NHS England, NHS Scotland, NHS Wales or HSC Northern Ireland — and no NHS official has reviewed this site.
- We are not clinicians. This site does not provide medical advice. In a life-threatening emergency call 999.
Who we are (and what we are not)
What A&E Wait Time is
- An independent, privately-run website that aggregates publicly-available NHS A&E waiting time statistics into one searchable place.
- A signposting tool — we link out to every original NHS source so you can verify any figure yourself.
- Maintained by the A&E Wait Time editorial team, an independent organisation responsible for the editorial standards on this site.
What A&E Wait Time is not
- Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by NHS England, NHS Scotland, NHS Wales, HSC Northern Ireland, or any individual NHS Trust.
- Not staffed by clinicians. No GMC, NMC or HCPC-registered professional reviews individual wait time figures or hospital pages.
- Not a medical service or triage tool. Nothing on this site is medical advice and it must not be used to decide whether to seek emergency care.
Why this matters: Health information sites that imply NHS endorsement or clinical review when there is none can mislead patients into delaying emergency care. We will never claim either — if a verifiable, registered UK clinician ever signs off our methodology, we will publish their name, registration number and review date here, and not before.
Where the numbers come from
Every wait time on the site is collected from a publicly available NHS Trust web page — the same pages any member of the public can visit themselves. We only display figures the trust has already chosen to publish; we do not generate, model or estimate wait times ourselves.
Coverage is genuinely patchy because most NHS Trusts in the UK do not publish a public live waiting-time page. If a trust doesn’t publish, we don’t list a wait time for them.
Full source register on /data-sources
The complete, automatically-generated list of every NHS Trust page we read from — with a link to each original source — lives on the data sources page.
The freshness label — what it means
Every wait number on the site carries the badge below. The badge tells you, at a glance, how fresh the underlying data is — not how recently we re-rendered the page.
Live
The figure is taken directly from the NHS Trust’s own public waiting-times page, with the trust’s own publication time. We always link out to the original so you can verify.
Example: An NHS Trust that updates its own A&E waiting times page roughly every 10 minutes.
Important: a “Live” badge means the trust's own dashboard was updated within the hour. It does not guarantee the wait you experience on arrival will match. Hospital departments fluctuate minute-by-minute; the published figure may be minutes out of date by the time you read it.
What we display, and what (very little) we calculate
Displayed as-published
- The headline wait time figure for each hospital.
- The total number of patients waiting, where the trust publishes it.
- The trust’s own published source date / timestamp.
- Opening hours, address, telephone and basic facility info, where the trust publishes it.
Computed by us (clearly labelled)
- Severity colour bucket (short / moderate / long) — simple thresholds: <120 min, 120–239 min, ≥240 min.
- Distance from your location (haversine great-circle) when you use A&E Near Me.
- Quietest-hours heatmap — an indicative weekly demand pattern shown for general guidance only, never as a wait-time prediction.
- “Region average” figures — the mean of the most-recent published wait at every hospital we track in that region.
When the site itself refreshes
Hospital pages with a Live source
Updated automatically every 15 minutes to ensure wait times stay current
Directory and region pages
Updated every 15 minutes so newly-tracked hospitals appear quickly
This methodology page
Re-reviewed at minimum every 90 days, or whenever a source's publication schedule changes
Honest limitations you should know about
- Coverage is patchy. Most NHS Trusts in the UK do not publish a public live waiting-time page. Where a trust does not publish, we do not list a wait time for it. We do not estimate, model or invent a figure to fill the gap.
- Wait times are not waiting times to be seen by a doctor. What each trust publishes varies — usually it is a current estimate of the time from arrival to being seen, treated, admitted, transferred or discharged. The actual time to be seen by a clinician within the department can be shorter, or much longer.
- Each trust defines its own metric. Different NHS Trusts publish slightly different figures (current wait, average wait, banded wait, patients-waiting count). We pass through what the trust publishes — comparisons between trusts should be treated as indicative only.
- Children's A&E and gynaecological emergencies are sometimes co-located. Where a hospital reports a single combined A&E figure, that figure may not reflect the wait at a children's or gynae A&E on the same site. Read the hospital page carefully.
- Severity buckets are our judgement, not the NHS's. We bucket waits as 'short' (<120 min), 'moderate' (120–239 min), or 'long' (≥240 min). These thresholds are ours and are intended for at-a-glance scanning, not clinical interpretation.
- Geolocation is approximate. Browser geolocation can be off by hundreds of metres in dense urban areas and several kilometres on mobile networks. Postcode lookups use centroid coordinates, not exact addresses.
- Figures may be up to 15 minutes stale. We re-read each NHS Trust page every 10 minutes. The freshness badge always shows the trust's own publication timestamp, not our re-fetch time, so you can spot a genuinely stale number.
Spotted an error? Tell us
If a wait time, opening hours, address, phone number or any other detail on the site looks wrong, please tell us. We aim to acknowledge corrections within 2 working days and to publish a fix or explanation within 5 working days.
Corrections inbox
hello@aewaittime.co.ukWhen we publish a material correction, we’ll add a dated entry to the change log below. We do not silently edit numbers.
Editorial standards
- Source transparency. Every wait number is traceable to a publicly-accessible NHS Trust web page. We always link to the source.
- No fabricated authority. We do not pretend to be NHS-affiliated, doctor-reviewed or government-endorsed. If we ever obtain such accreditation, we will publish names, registration numbers and dates.
- Visible freshness. Every page shows when each underlying data point was published, not just when the page was rendered. Stale data must look stale.
- Corrections, not silent edits. Material corrections to wait times, hospital details or methodology are dated and listed in the change log on this page.
- Patient safety first. Every page that shows a wait time also surfaces 999 and NHS 111 prominently. We will never show a wait time without an emergency-call signpost on the same screen.
Read the full editorial policy or the page-by-page data-source register.
Change log
- Initial publication of methodology page. Disclosed how we collect data from publicly available NHS Trust web pages, what the Live freshness label means, refresh cadence and honest limitations.