NHS & Health FOI Tracker
What NHS trusts and central government are asked about health policy, medicines and care — and how they answer.
An independent tracker and analysis of Freedom of Information requests to NHS trusts, the Department of Health and Social Care, the MHRA and public health regulators, built from GOV.UK's public disclosure data and individual requests via WhatDoTheyKnow.
2,062
FOI releases tracked
54
Organisations covered
10
Topics
1 Sept 2026
Latest release
Volume of FOI releases over time
20062026
Latest analysis
- Bigger requests get refused far more - and health is where the effect is strongest
Across the dataset as a whole, refusal rate climbs steadily with how many sub-questions a request has - simple requests refused 16% of the time, six-part ones 31%. In health specifically, that climb is the steepest of any niche: 23.5% to 58.1%.
- Does pushing back on a refusal actually work? We can only partly answer that
2.2% of every release we track is a genuine internal review - a requester formally challenging the original decision. What that review actually decided is legible in only a small fraction of cases, which is itself worth being honest about.
- Does a slow answer mean a refusal? Not really - not here
Cross-referencing response speed against refusal and exemption language across 246 health FOI exchanges finds almost no relationship between the two - unlike our policing tracker, where the two are entangled in a genuinely strange way. In health, slow mostly just means slow.
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