Summary
There are a range of statistics to help people understand health and the performance of the National Health Service (NHS) in Wales.
The Welsh Government publishes statistics relating to a variety of health related topics. These include NHS performance and waiting times, activity across different health care settings, staffing, finance, and mental health.
More granular breakdowns for many of these topics are published on the Welsh Government’s new StatsWales site. A Chief Statistician’s blog published in December 2025 covered changes so far and forthcoming plans for the StatsWales service.
Public Health Wales publishes some official statistics on topics including cancer and screening.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also publishes some statistics about health for England and Wales.
Things to consider
Due to the devolved nature of UK health care, there are differing legislative frameworks, policies and priorities, commissioning processes and data systems. This can make it challenging to produce comparable statistics.
In 2024, producers of health statistics across the UK collaborated with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to produce a series of articles on different health data topics. These articles advise which data can and cannot be compared between UK nations. For example, statistics about accident and emergency (A&E) wait times for Wales’ major Emergency Departments are broadly comparable with the equivalent departments in England and Scotland.
What to look out for
Waiting times for NHS treatment are a topic of high public interest across the UK. There are several sources of waiting times statistics in Wales, including on:
- Referral to treatment times
- NHS cancer waiting times
- NHS diagnostic and therapy service waiting times
- NHS referrals for first outpatient appointments
- Time spent in NHS emergency departments
Data for many of these topics are summarised in the monthly NHS activity and performance summary.
In November 2025, the Welsh Government identified an issue with the referral to treatment time data submitted by Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCUHB). The Welsh Government suspended publication of data for BCU, and published a blog outlining the issue and the steps it was taking to fix it. Following an independent review of BCUHB’s data processes in December, revised data were published in January 2026.
It is important to be aware that waiting lists figures are reported by the number of patient pathways and not the number of individual patients waiting. The number of patient pathways is not the same as the number of individual patients, because some people have multiple open pathways. Estimates for the number of individual patients waiting to start treatment by health board can be found in the NHS waiting lists: estimate of unique patients dataset on StatsWales.
While looking at the different types of waiting lists together can help to provide an overall picture of NHS demand and activity, they should not be summed to obtain overall totals of people waiting. As many people are on more than one waiting list, adding lists together would result in double counting individuals.