Methodology

Data sources

PlainNHS aggregates publicly published NHS performance data from three upstream publishers, each releasing under the UK Open Government Licence v3.0 or equivalent open terms.

• NHS England Statistics — the RTT 18-week monthly release, the A&E waiting-times publication, and the cancer waiting-times release.
• NHS Digital — GP practice ODS data, hospital episode statistics (HES), and statistical publications (digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information).
• Care Quality Commission — inspection ratings and provider data from the CQC's public data portal.

Coverage scope. PlainNHS currently profiles 12 NHS Trusts and 10 GP practices — a selected subset of England's roughly 207 NHS trusts and roughly 6,150 GP practices. Coverage is expanding over time; the current entity count is shown on the homepage and reflects the live database, not a fixed target.

Pipeline

Our ETL pipeline is open-source-style and reproducible:

1. Download. Scheduled jobs pull the latest published file from each upstream source. The publication date is recorded as the data vintage.
2. Normalise. Files are parsed into the PlainNHS schema: trusts, gp_practices, procedures, waiting_times, cqc_ratings. Field names are mapped to common identifiers (ODS codes for organisations, NHS-defined procedure codes for pathways).
3. Validate. Each ingested row is checked for the expected range (e.g. RTT performance is a percentage 0-100; CQC rating is one of four bands). Out-of-range values are flagged for manual review rather than published.
4. Serve. Pages are rendered live from the database. Numbers in the page body come from `SELECT` statements against the live table, not hardcoded constants.

Derived figures

We compute three classes of derived figures, each documented inline:

• Per-Trust procedure waits. Median and 90th-percentile waiting time per Trust per procedure, anchored on the national NHS England median. Where a Trust has not published a figure for a given procedure for the current reporting month, we either omit it from the table or label it as “Not reported” rather than impute a value.
• Group means in research papers. The research section computes group means using the live database via documented SQL. Each paper's “Method” section shows the SQL used.
• Trust profile summaries. Plain-language paragraphs are drafted from the underlying data and reviewed against the cited source. No number in a summary paragraph appears that is not also in the table above it on the same page.

Data vintage and updates

NHS performance data is published monthly with a one-to-two-month lag. PlainNHS aims to refresh within a week of each upstream release, though the data on file may lag behind the most recent NHS publication at any given time. The data vintage (e.g. “2025-Q4”) is shown on every entity page next to the published values, so you can always see exactly how current it is.

Handling gaps and uncertainty

When a value is missing from the upstream release (e.g. a Trust suppressed a small-cohort cancer-waiting figure), we display “Not reported” on the relevant page rather than imputing a value. We do not extrapolate, model, or interpolate NHS-published figures.

What we do not measure

PlainNHS does not measure individual clinical outcomes (mortality, complication rates, infection rates). Trust-level outcome data is published by other NHS releases (e.g. the SHMI mortality indicator) and we do not currently integrate them.

Reproducibility

The ETL pipeline and the per-page query patterns are documented in our publisher repository. To verify any figure, click the source link on the relevant entity page and compare against the upstream NHS publication. If you find a discrepancy, see our corrections policy.

Standards & reference frameworks

Our editorial process aligns with several public-domain reference frameworks:

• National Framework for NHS Continuing Healthcare (UK Department of Health and Social Care) — referenced by our CHC eligibility guide.
• Open Government Licence v3.0 (UK National Archives) — the licence under which all upstream NHS data is published.
• NICE Guideline NG12: Suspected cancer recognition and referral — referenced by our cancer 2-week-wait guide.
• World Health Organization (WHO) data — used for international context comparisons in research papers.
• National Health Service (England) on Wikipedia — neutral encyclopaedic context.
• Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman — referenced in our complaints guide.
• Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication — reference for derived data licensing.
• W3C WCAG 2.2 accessibility guidelines — standard we target on PlainNHS.

Editorial review and updates

Editorial copy on PlainNHS is reviewed against the source publication when added and re-verified whenever the upstream publication changes. Where an upstream figure changes between releases, we update the page within a week and add a brief change note in the page footer if the change is material (more than a one-percentage-point shift on an operational metric, or a CQC band change).

We follow the guidance of IPSO's Editors' Code of Practice on accuracy, distinction between comment and fact, and corrections. Even though PlainNHS is not an IPSO member publisher, the Code is the most-respected UK reference for accuracy in non-clinical reporting and we adhere to it voluntarily.

Important disclaimer

This portal presents publicly available NHS performance data. It is not medical advice. Statistical waiting-time figures are aggregates and do not predict individual case timing.