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Source: NHS England RTT Statistics, Jul 2026. Last updated 2026-09-11.
Ready-to-use story angles
1. The longest NHS wait in 2026
Across 17 common procedures tracked, the longest median NHS England wait is for tonsillectomy at 14 weeks. Going private costs .
See the tonsillectomy data →2. Where NHS waits are still fast
Not every procedure has a record-breaking wait — the median wait for colonoscopy is just 10 weeks nationally. The lowest published private price is £2,558 (Spire Healthcare, Spire St Anthony's Hospital).
See the colonoscopy data →3. The knee replacement postcode lottery
The shortest median NHS wait for trauma & orthopaedic care is in Reading at 9 weeks. The longest is in Leicester at 23 weeks — a difference of 14 weeks for the same procedure depending on where you live.
See knee replacement waits across all cities →4. The cost of going private
Across the 17 common procedures tracked, 13 have a price published by Nuffield Health or Spire Healthcare on their own hospital price lists. Published prices run from £400 for mri scan (Nuffield Health, Manchester Diagnostic Suite) to £20,120 for knee replacement surgery (Nuffield Health, Cambridge). The remaining 4 are not priced in a quotable form by either operator, which is itself a finding: the figures here come from 71 of 82 hospitals across two of the UK’s private hospital groups, read 2026-10-05, and cover neither the whole market nor every procedure in it.
Suggested attribution
Methodology in one paragraph
TreatCompare ingests NHS England's monthly RTT Provider Extract Excel file, filters it to 30 English cities and 9 medical specialties, and joins each row with typical UK private price ranges from major hospital groups (Spire Healthcare, Nuffield Health, Circle Health Group, Ramsay Health Care UK and HCA Healthcare). The pipeline runs automatically on the 15th of every month. Coverage is currently NHS England only. NHS data is published at the specialty level (Treatment Function code), not per-procedure, so “knee replacement waiting time” reflects the broader Trauma & Orthopaedics specialty wait. Full methodology at /methodology#nhs-data.
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