The shape of health FOI, now with 25 trusts added: what changed

We recently added individual, citizen-submitted requests to 25 major NHS trusts (via WhatDoTheyKnow — see why most trusts weren't here before) on top of the national-level GOV.UK data this tracker started with. It's worth being transparent about how much that one change reshaped the picture, because it's a useful lesson in how much a single data source can skew an apparent ranking.

Before: a national-policy view, dominated by one regulator

With GOV.UK alone, Medicines & Regulation was the largest topic by a wide margin — built almost entirely from the MHRA's weekly disclosure rhythm — followed by a much smaller, mostly historical Hospital Trusts & Estates category carried by the defunct regulator Monitor's 2015-2017 archive.

After: trust-level operations now dominate

Adding real, current requests directly to hospital trusts flipped that ranking entirely. Hospital Trusts & Estates is now by far the largest topic we track — built from trusts answering questions about their own wards, waiting times, staffing, and clinical services, the kind of detail that was structurally invisible to a GOV.UK-only view. Medicines & Regulation, NHS Waiting Times and Mental Health Services follow, each with a healthy mix of both sources.

Why this matters beyond just us

It's a concrete illustration of a point we make on our about page: what a FOI tracker appears to say the public cares about often reflects which bodies happen to publish accessible logs, not actual demand. Waiting times and hospital operations were almost certainly always among the most-asked-about subjects in UK healthcare — they just weren't visible in a dataset built only from what central government itself chooses to disclose. Broadening the source didn't just add volume; it changed which subject looks like the "biggest" one, which is exactly the kind of thing a transparency tool should be upfront about rather than let sit as an unexamined ranking.