Transparency Grade: B
Surgery Wait Times
What's the data showing?
Length of wait times for a wide variety of surgeries, identifying number of cases on the waiting list, and broken down by health authority, hospital, and individual surgeon.
Detailed Data Available (for part of the process)
While the data isn't entirely complete, and does lack some context for interpretation, overall this site is a remarkable example of how health data should be made available to the public.
However…
These estimates are misleading in a number of ways. A major issue is that wait time often isn't counted until a surgery date is actually assigned. So the months spent waiting just to get booked aren't reflected in the official numbers. And that gap matters.
The time spent waiting between diagnosis and surgery needs to count, but it isn't reflected here. Nor is the wait time from referral to a surgeon to actually seeing them to actually getting the diagnosis.
Still, what data is being shown is a model for what should be done for the many areas of health care, noted on this site and elsewhere, who publish either no data or communicate misleading information. So why is it only done for surgery?
