NHS FOI Tracker

GOV.UK barely covers individual NHS trusts — so we went and got the data ourselves

31 August 2026

This tracker started out using only GOV.UK's Freedom of Information feed, which meant almost nothing from any individual hospital trust — just national bodies like the MHRA and the old Monitor archive. That's still true of GOV.UK on its own. It's no longer true of this site as a whole.

Why GOV.UK's feed skips them

NHS trusts and foundation trusts are their own statutory organisations, and each one runs its own FOI disclosure log — when it runs one at all. We checked a representative sample of major trusts directly and found that most publish no scrapable historical log on their own website: some only offer a request-submission form, some publish a generic "publication scheme" listing categories of routine documents rather than individual requests, and a couple say a log exists without actually linking to it. GOV.UK's own feed reflects the same gap - it's a central-government channel, not a trust-level one.

Where the trust-level data actually comes from now

Rather than treat that as a dead end, we pull individual, citizen-submitted requests from WhatDoTheyKnow, a free FOI service run by the charity mySociety, which turned out to have exactly the archive most trusts don't maintain themselves. We currently track requests to 25 major NHS trusts through it - acute hospitals, children's hospitals, and mental health trusts across England and Scotland - alongside the MHRA, DHSC and Monitor data GOV.UK provides directly.

The subjects are a genuine, unedited sample from what we've indexed:

  • "Freedom of Information Request – Ophthalmology Waiting Times and Patient Numbers" — Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
  • "Use of Insourcing for Pathology Services (Haematology, Histopathology, Microbiology)" — Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
  • "MH crisis assessments" — Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust
  • "Active surveillance for men diagnosed with prostate cancer" — East London NHS Foundation Trust

That's operational, trust-specific detail GOV.UK's feed was never going to surface - waiting lists, service structures, specific clinical pathways - a different texture from the medicines-regulation and national-policy material GOV.UK contributes.

What this means for "coverage"

This tracker now has two sources with two different jobs: GOV.UK for medicines regulation and national health policy (see our piece on the MHRA's weekly FOI releases), and WhatDoTheyKnow for the trust-level detail GOV.UK never touches. Neither is exhaustive - WhatDoTheyKnow only has what requesters chose to submit, and we cap how many historical pages we pull per trust in any one sync - but together they cover far more of the health system than either source alone. See our methodology for exactly how each source is combined and classified.