The Open Government Licence is the licence under which NHS England and other public bodies release their statistics for anyone to read, copy and republish, provided the source is credited. It is the licence that allows a figure to move from a government publication onto a page like this one without a separate agreement being drawn up for each dataset.

How the credit is given

The licence sets out how that credit has to appear: in the publisher's own wording. Depending on which dataset a figure comes from, one of two credit lines appears alongside it on this site.

• "Contains information from NHS England, licenced under the current version of the Open Government Licence."
• "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0."

Each figure carries the credit line that matches its own source, together with the month the publisher issued it.

What the licence does not tell you

The licence covers the right to use and share the data. It says nothing about whether a particular figure is still the publisher's latest one, because a monthly release can be revised or replaced after it goes out. That is a separate question from the licensing itself, and it is why the publication month sits next to every figure.

NHS England is being abolished as a separate arm's-length body, with its functions moving into the Department of Health and Social Care under the NHS Modernisation Bill. That is a change to who runs the organisation, not to the treatment a patient receives, and it does not on its own alter what the underlying waiting-time and provider figures measure.

What happens to the published statistics

NHS England's statistical releases continue to be published while the transfer takes place. A dataset can move from one department's website to another, or be issued under a different publisher's name, without the figures themselves changing: the same referral-to-treatment measures, the same providers, the same months. What can change is which body is named as publisher on a given release and where that release is hosted.

How that is tracked here

Every entry in the source register carries the day it was last checked, so a reader can see when the citation for a figure was last confirmed against the page it points to. Where a release moves from an NHS England address to one under the Department of Health and Social Care, the register is updated to follow it, with a fresh read date attached.

What to check if a link looks wrong

• Whether NHS England or the Department of Health and Social Care is shown as publisher, since this can change mid-transition even for the same dataset
• The publication month given for a figure, which remains the true measure of how current it is regardless of which department is hosting it
• GOV.UK, where superseded pages are often kept, if a direct link to an NHS England release stops resolving

Every figure that appears elsewhere on this site, a waiting time, a CQC rating, a self-pay price, traces back to a dataset published by a named public body. This page is where each of those datasets sits on its own, one row per dataset, so you can go and look at the publisher's own release.

What each row records

• Publisher, the body that produced the figure, named in full.
• Licence, the terms the data is published under, most commonly the Open Government Licence.
• Credit line, copied word for word from the publisher's own data row, so anyone reusing a figure has the exact wording the publisher asks for.
• Cadence, how often the publisher puts out a new figure.
• Latest figure month, the month the current published figure actually covers.
• Read date, the day this site looked at that figure, kept separate from the publication month because the two are rarely the same.

What feeds the register

The datasets behind it come from bodies with different jobs: NHS waiting-time publications measure how long patients wait; the Care Quality Commission's ratings measure how a provider is run; the Private Healthcare Information Network publishes what self-pay providers charge and how their consultants perform; the Commonwealth Fund's Mirror, Mirror series places the UK's health system against others. One entry, by way of example, points to OpenPrescribing, run by the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford, which publishes England's GP prescribing data drawn from the NHS Business Services Authority through a free API.

A publisher can revise a figure after this site has read it. Where that happens, the row keeps the figure as it stood on the read date shown and links to the publisher's current release, so you can see whether anything has changed since.