Qualitywatch
A Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation programme
NHS performance dashboard
This new dashboard provides an overview of NHS performance in England.
- 7.39 million cases were waiting to start planned (elective) hospital treatment in April 2025- this represents 6.23 million individual patients waiting for treatment. Approximately 60% of patients were waiting less than 18 weeks to start treatment.
- In May 2025, a quarter (24.6%) of all patients waited longer than 4 hours in A&E. The numbers of patients waiting long hours for a hospital bed has continued to come down (130,000~ waiting over 4 hours and 42,000~ waiting over 12 hours)
- In May 2025, ambulance response times for category 1 calls (life threatening emergencies) remained under 8 minutes on average, with 90% were attended to in 14 minutes. Average (mean) response times for category 2 calls (emergency conditions, such as stroke), are still nearly 10 minutes above the target of 18 minutes.
A&E and ambulance
Waiting times for diagnostics and planned care
For interactive charts showing the quality of health and social care over time, please refer to our 200+ indicators.
Notes
Two month (62 day) cancer waits are from urgent suspected cancer referrals, breast symptomatic referrals, urgent screening referrals, or consultant upgrades.
Between May 2019 and May 2023, in response to proposals made in the Clinically-Led Review of NHS Access Standards Interim Report, 14 hospital trusts acted as field testing sites for alternatives to the existing four-hour A&E standard. During this period, these trusts did not report performance on the four-hour standard and are hence absent from the data for May 2019 to May 2023. Reporting on the findings of the Clinical Review of Standards for Urgent and Emergency Care is now available.
Methodology
The data used in this dashboard is extracted from NHS England’s monthly performance statistics publication. This is published on the second Thursday of each month. It provides data from the previous month for A&E and ambulance performance, and for the month before this for elective care, cancer, and diagnostics performance.