About NHS & Health FOI Tracker

NHS & Health FOI Tracker is an independent project that tracks and analyses Freedom of Information (FOI) activity relevant to this site's subject area, combining two different public sources. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by HM Government, mySociety, or any public body listed here.

Two sources, covering different gaps

We currently track 2,062 releases from 54 organisations, made up of 570 from GOV.UK, 1,492 individual requests from WhatDoTheyKnow.

GOV.UK

Sourced from GOV.UK's public Transparency and Freedom of Information releases feed, via GOV.UK's own search API, and reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This covers central government departments, executive agencies and arm's-length bodies - it does not generally include the 43 territorial police forces or most individual NHS trusts, which publish their own disclosure logs (if they publish one at all) on their own websites. For NHS & Health FOI Tracker, that means GOV.UK's own contribution centres on bodies like the Department of Health and Social Care, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, NHS England and public health bodies - national policy and regulation, rather than local operational logs.

WhatDoTheyKnow

To cover the gap GOV.UK leaves for NHS trusts, we also pull individual, citizen-submitted requests from WhatDoTheyKnow, a free FOI request service run by the UK charity mySociety. We looked into scraping each organisation's own website directly first - in practice, the large majority publish no usable historical log of their own (see our Insights section for what we found when we checked), so WhatDoTheyKnow's own public archive of real submitted requests and responses is a more complete and consistent source. Unlike GOV.UK, this isn't Crown-copyright material under the OGL - it's a third-party archive of correspondence with public authorities, which WhatDoTheyKnow's own house rules explicitly support being cited and reused. We link to the original request on WhatDoTheyKnow on every page.

How releases are classified

GOV.UK releases are tagged automatically using a transparent, keyword-based classifier: we score title and description against a curated list of topic keywords, and where a release has no clear keyword match, we fall back to the identity of the publishing organisation (for example, any release from the Ministry of Justice is treated as policing & justice-relevant even if its title is a generic "disclosure log"). A release is only assigned to this site's subject area when the signal is unambiguous - where it's genuinely unclear or split evenly between subject areas, we leave it unclassified rather than guess. WhatDoTheyKnow requests are assigned directly, since we already know the niche from which organisation we pulled them for - the same keyword classifier is still used to tag their finer-grained topic within that niche. This is a heuristic, not a manual review, so it won't be perfect.

How often this updates

The underlying dataset is refreshed on a daily schedule from both sources.

Attachments and full text

Release pages on this site show a short excerpt and a link to the original, not the full response - both to respect the source and because it's where the authoritative version lives. Behind the scenes, though, we now read the full text of GOV.UK releases and force-portal write-ups, including attached PDFs and CSVs, for internal analysis rather than republication - it's what pieces like our Insights articles on refusal and disclosure patterns are built from. We deliberately haven't extended this to WhatDoTheyKnow's individual request pages: they sit behind meaningfully stronger bot-protection than WhatDoTheyKnow's own feeds, which read to us as a real line they've drawn between supporting programmatic access and discouraging bulk scraping of individual pages - one we'd rather respect than route around. WhatDoTheyKnow releases on this site remain at the short-excerpt level the service's own feed provides.