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NHS pressure across all sorts of services has been breaking records in recent years, but are things getting better?

Check out the waiting list for NHS treatment in your local area, how many beds are free, how long people have to wait at A&E, and how that compares with the national picture.

If you live in England, Scotland or Wales enter your postcode or trust name below:

How is the wider NHS performing?

Waiting times for cancer patients, where rapid diagnosis and treatment are crucial to survival rates, remain longer than recommended targets.

In recent years, more than one in three patients have waited over the target two months to start their treatment after first being referred.

And across all specialties, the number of people seeking treatment has been rising faster than the number of people NHS England can treat every month.

Bringing down the waiting list is a key target for Rishi Sunak. From January 2023 when he made this pledge, to December 2023, the waiting list had grown from 7.21 million to 7.6 million.

The list has now started to reduce from a record 7.77 million in September 2023 - however, a huge backlog remains.

Some patients are experiencing very long waits.

The number of people waiting more than a year is more than 200 times higher than it was before the pandemic.

NHS England says it is focusing on waits over 18 months and aims to bring year-long waits down to pre-pandemic levels by March 2025.

Waiting times at A&E have been one of the biggest issues for hospitals post-pandemic.

The share of people waiting over four hours in major A&Es has improved from its worst point in December 2022, when half of patients waited longer.

However, performance remains far from ideal, with more than two in five (45%) waiting over four hours in December 2023, nine times higher than the NHS target.

A higher number of people have been attending A&E than before the pandemic, bouncing back from a brief drop when people were avoiding hospitals at the height of COVID.

Despite this, the number of people admitted to hospital from A&E remains lower than in pre-pandemic years. with some drawing a link between this and a lower number of free beds resulting in 'bed rationing'.

Current NHS guidance is that a maximum of 92% of hospital beds should be occupied, while the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommend no more than 90% (nine in ten), to reduce negative risks associated with overfilled beds.

A decrease in the availability of beds is a trend that began before the pandemic, but has ramped up in recent years.

In England, numbers have been consistently below NICE recommended levels since August 2021 and below the NHS target since February 2022.

Part of the problem is prolonged hospital stays (also known as bed-blocking).

This is often linked to pressures in other parts of the health and social care system, for example when patients can't be discharged to appropriate social care providers even though they are ready to leave hospital.

The share of hospital stays over two weeks has been close to one in three patients over the past two winters.

The average waiting time for ambulance calls where the patient is deemed to be in a life-threatening condition has improved compared with a peak of over ten and a half minutes reached in December 2022.

However, ambulance response times have remained slower than the seven-minute target for Category 1 calls and more than two times longer than the 18-minute target for Category 2 calls, which include strokes and heart attacks.

The number of life-threatening incidents the ambulance service has been dealing with has also been at historically high levels.

Methodology

The lookup works by finding the hospitals that are closest to you and working out which trusts run services there. In some cases, trusts operate services at hospitals that are some distance from where they are based.

Postcode lookups for bed occupancy and waiting list data currently only work for trusts within NHS England and Scotland, as timely data is not available for the other UK nations.

Credits:

Przemyslaw Pluta - Lead data engineer

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The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open-source information. Through multimedia storytelling, we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.