A referral is the start of something measured. Once it turns into a booked, consultant-led appointment, the NHS has a maximum time it works to, and separately from that clock, you have a say in where the appointment happens. Most people know the first part vaguely and have never heard the second at all.

The 18-week standard

The maximum waiting time for non-urgent, consultant-led treatment is 18 weeks from the day your appointment is booked. That is the standard the NHS measures itself against for routine care, and it is the figure worth having in front of you if you are trying to work out whether your own wait is running long or on track.

What it does not tell you is how a particular hospital or team near you is actually performing this month, or what an inspector has found about the care given there. Those are separate questions, answered from separate published figures, and this site sets out how to read waiting-time measures properly on How NHS Waiting Times Are Measured.

Your right to choose

You have the legal right to choose the hospital or service you're referred to, and the clinical team led by a consultant. This right sits alongside the 18-week standard: the standard is a maximum, the choice is yours to make within it.

Exercising that right means having something to compare. A waiting-time figure on its own tells you how long, a rating tells you how the care there has been assessed, and put together they give you enough to make the choice the right actually gives you.

Checking what you're told

Every figure used on this site is attributed to the body that published it, with the month it covers and the day it was checked. Where you want to see that sourcing laid out in one place, or check a figure for yourself against the publisher's own release, that is what the Data and Sources page is for. The About Healthcare.uk page sets out who publishes this site and how it is kept up to date.

A Care Quality Commission (CQC) rating tells you how a service performed at its last inspection. A waiting-time figure tells you how long people referred to that service have been waiting in a given month. Neither number stands in for the other, and putting them side by side gives you a fuller picture than either alone.

The four ratings

The CQC gives each service one of four ratings:

• Outstanding
• Good
• Requires improvement
• Inadequate

The rating applies to the service that was inspected, not to a single specialty's waiting list on its own, so check that the service covers the treatment you were referred for before you weigh it against a waiting-time figure for that treatment.

Two figures, two clocks

A CQC rating carries the date of the inspection behind it, and it stays in place until the CQC next inspects. A waiting-time figure is published on a monthly cycle. The two do not move at the same pace, so the rating sitting next to a waiting-time figure can be considerably older than the figure itself. Check the date on each before you set one against the other.

What a mismatch tells you

A provider with a shorter wait is not automatically the better choice, and a provider with the higher rating is not automatically the faster one. A shorter wait next to a lower rating, or a longer wait next to a higher rating, is not a contradiction that needs resolving. It is two separate pieces of information about the same provider, and which one matters more is a judgement only you can make for your own situation.

Read how a waiting-time figure is built on how NHS waiting times are measured, and check the publisher, licence and read date behind any figure you are comparing on the data and sources page.

What you're choosing between

A referral from your GP doesn't tell you which hospital treats your condition fastest, how that provider is rated, or whether paying for the same treatment yourself is even an option nearby. Those are separate questions, and the answer to each one changes by provider and by month.

Healthcare.uk sets out what is on offer for a given treatment in England, the NHS route and the self-pay route side by side, drawn from the published record.

Where the figures come from

Every figure is attributed to the public body that publishes it: NHS England for waiting times, the Care Quality Commission for provider ratings, the Department of Health and Social Care for national policy and news. Each one carries the month it was published and the day it was read, because a wait published one month can have moved by the next, and a figure without both dates is not something you can check.

The full register of sources, licences and read dates sits on the data and sources page, line by line, so you can check any figure shown here against the publisher's own current release. The rules behind the waiting-time figures themselves, including where the clock starts and what pauses it, are set out on the page on how NHS waiting times are measured.

Who makes the site, who pays for it and how a reader reports an error is set out on the about page.