What we can't tell you · Partial

How long are people waiting for NHS treatment and in A&E, and can the figures be read by a machine?

Partial Official data answers part of the question: some categories, some years, some geographies or one stage of a process.

Why

NHS England publishes the referral-to-treatment waiting list and the monthly A&E attendance and four-hour performance figures as spreadsheets on its statistics website. The publication pages and the files behind them sit behind a bot-management gate that returns an empty response to automated requests, so the figures can be read by a person in a browser but not fetched by a script. There is no documented API for either series. Civometry has not loaded them until a stable machine-readable route exists.

What is known

What is not known

A machine-readable download or API for either series that an automated pipeline can fetch
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which publish separately on different definitions

Who holds the data

NHS England

Would a Freedom of Information request help?

Unlikely. The figures are published; the gap is the access route, not the record.

Privacy and disclosure restrictions

None at national level. Trust-level figures are published; patient-level data is not.

Official sources checked

Last reviewed 2026-09-03. Availability changes; if a publication now answers this question, challenge the classification below.