My Medical Gateway Blog

NHS waiting lists in England are now at 7.2 million cases, though the real figure is likely closer to 9 million, leaving patients struggling to understand how long they will wait for treatment. Whether you need a hip replacement, knee surgery, spinal procedure, shoulder operation or ACL reconstruction, finding accurate regional NHS waiting times is far from straightforward. Here is how patients can navigate NHS data, compare hospitals and uncover realistic waiting times in their area.

The NHS publishes a huge amount of data on waiting lists. But if you are trying to answer a simple question – how long will I wait for a knee, hip, spine, shoulder or ACL procedure in my region – the reality is far messier than the headline figures suggest.

Start with what we do know.

At a national level, the NHS elective waiting list sits at around 7.2 million cases, though the true figure is likely closer to 9 million once hidden demand is accounted for. Within that, trauma and orthopaedics is one of the single largest contributors to the backlog, with well over 800,000 patients waiting for treatment.  

This matters because all five procedures in question – knees, hips, spine, shoulders and ACL – sit inside that orthopaedic category.

The most current and reliable dataset is the NHS England Referral to Treatment (RTT) release, published monthly.   Using the latest available data (February 2026), the regional trauma and orthopaedic waiting list looks broadly like this:

• Midlands: approximately 173,000
• South-East: approximately 138,000
• North-West: approximately 118,000
• North-East and Yorkshire: approximately 114,000
• East of England: approximately 96,000
• London: approximately 96,000
• South-West: approximately 89,000

Across England, the median wait for orthopaedic treatment is now around 14–15 weeks, but that headline masks a deeper problem: only around 60–61% of patients are treated within the NHS’s 18-week target, far below the 92% standard set in the NHS Constitution.  

That is the system-level view. But patients do not experience the NHS as a “specialty”. They experience it as a specific operation. So what does the data actually say for each of the five procedures?

For hips and knees, there is the strongest evidence base, but it is indirect. These procedures are grouped under “arthroplasty” in orthopaedics. Local NHS data gives a sense of real-world waiting times: one UK orthopaedic provider reports around 101 weeks from referral to treatment for hip and knee replacement pathways.  

That is nearly two years.

However, there is no national NHS dataset that breaks this down regionally in a consistent way. Instead, hips and knees are absorbed into the overall orthopaedic backlog in the RTT data. The National Joint Registry provides detailed information on volumes and outcomes, but not a live regional waiting list.

For shoulders, the picture is similar but slightly worse. The same provider-level data suggests waits of around 62 weeks for shoulder procedures.  Again, this is not part of a clean national dataset:  it is an example of what is happening on the ground rather than a standardised regional figure.

Spinal surgery is where things start to stretch further. The same data indicates waits of around 101 weeks for spinal procedures – broadly in line with hips and knees in terms of delay.   But nationally, spine cases are split across trauma and orthopaedics and neurosurgery, meaning there is no single dataset that captures spinal waiting lists cleanly at regional level.

ACL surgery is the weakest area of all from a data perspective. It is typically grouped into knee pathways, but there is no national NHS publication that isolates ACL reconstruction as its own category. In practical terms, it disappears into the broader orthopaedic waiting list. 

So what does the NHS actually publish? There are three main layers.

First, RTT data gives you the total backlog and regional variation, but only at specialty level.  

Second, the Waiting List Minimum Data Set (WLMDS), used in tools like the NHS App and My Planned Care, gives more granular provider-level waiting times, but still grouped by specialty rather than procedure.

Third, specialist registries and clinical programmes (like the National Joint Registry and GIRFT) provide deep insight into specific procedures but focus on outcomes and activity rather than waiting lists.

What does not exist is a single, unified dataset that says: this is the waiting list for hips in the Midlands, or ACL reconstruction in London.

Instead, the reality has to be reconstructed.

You can say with confidence that orthopaedic waits are long, that they vary significantly by region, and that procedures like hip and knee replacement are commonly running at or beyond one year waits in practice. You can also say that spinal and shoulder procedures are facing similar delays, and that ACL surgery is buried within the same backlog. But you cannot pull a clean, official table that shows all five procedures broken down by region. That is the gap.

The NHS is highly transparent at the macro level. It tells you how many people are waiting and how long they have been waiting. But at the level that actually matters to patients – a specific operation, in a specific region – the system becomes opaque. 

And that is the key point. The data exists. But not in the form that patients, or policymakers, actually need. That is why MMG is embarking on a national research project to uncover the actual waiting list times by region for the five most in-demand and debilitating surgical procedures for NHS patients:  knee, hip, spine, shoulder or ACL procedure.

Watch this space.