Last checked: 30 August 2026
The short version: the weeks shown on eUKarea are example averages built around verified national statistics, not live per-hospital waiting times. No public UK source publishes real-time, hospital-by-hospital waits specifically for hip or knee replacement, so we're honest that ours are indicative, and we tell you exactly where to check the real number before you decide anything.
The stats you see for England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are drawn from each nation's own official waiting-time publications: NHS England's Referral to Treatment (RTT) statistics, Public Health Scotland's waiting times release, StatsWales, and the Department of Health Northern Ireland. These are genuinely published, genuinely dated figures, and we link to the source, not just quote a number.
You'll sometimes see two different-looking numbers for "the same" wait, and both can be genuinely correct at once. The median is the middle value: half of patients wait less, half wait more, and it's a better guide to a typical experience. The average (mean) gets pulled upward by a smaller number of people who wait considerably longer, so it usually runs higher. For hip and knee replacement nationally, the median currently sits around 13 to 15 weeks, while the average is closer to 27 to 29 weeks. We show the median as the headline figure because it's more representative, but we mention the average too, because if you end up in that longer-waiting group, the median alone would understate what you're facing.
None of the four UK health systems publish a live, continuously updated waiting time for "hip replacement at Hospital X" the way flight-tracking apps show a live flight. What does exist is specialty-level data, Trauma & Orthopaedics as a whole, not hip and knee replacement specifically, published monthly with a reporting lag. We build our per-hospital estimates around that verified specialty-level baseline, adjusted for what's publicly known about each hospital's typical position, and label them clearly as examples.
Live, per-hospital, procedure-specific waiting-time feeds would make this tool meaningfully better, and connecting to those feeds as they become available is an active goal, not an afterthought. Until then, we'd rather be clearly honest about an estimate than quietly confident about a number we can't actually verify in real time.
Questions about a specific figure you've seen on the site? Contact hello@eukarea.co.uk.