How to choose a hospital
Reviewed 27 July 2026 · HospitalCheck editorial
There is no single “best” hospital. The right choice depends on your condition, on what matters most to you — a shorter wait, particular expertise, or being close to home and family — and, above all, on whether your care is planned or an emergency. This guide explains how to weigh the figures on this site sensibly, and what each one can and can't tell you.
Start with the type of care
For an emergency you do notshop around: call 999 or go to your nearest A&E, and for urgent-but-not-emergency help call 111. The A&E figures on this site — four-hour performance, twelve-hour waits and attendance numbers — describe how busy a department is. That is a measure of system pressure, not of care quality, and not a reason to travel past a nearer hospital when minutes matter. Choice applies to planned care: when your GP refers you for most non-urgent hospital treatment in England, you can usually choose where you go. See your right to choose.
Waiting times — look by specialty, not just the headline
Waiting times vary a lot between specialties, so a trust's overall figure can hide big differences between, say, orthopaedics and dermatology. Check the by-specialty table on the trust page rather than the trust-wide headline. Remember the figures are published per trust, not per building, so every hospital run by a trust shows the same waiting times. If your wait is long, you may have the right to be referred to a hospital with a shorter one. Our guide to NHS waiting times explained covers how to read these figures, and your right to choose covers asking for a shorter list.
Inspection ratings (CQC, England)
In England the Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator. It inspects services and rates them across five key questions — whether they are safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led — and, where it rates a location as a whole, gives an overall rating of Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement or Inadequate. A rating reflects the last inspection and can be several years old, so always check the publication date shown. CQC covers England only. See the CQC ratings overview and the CQC methodology.
Safety & outcomes — handle with care
These figures repay careful reading. The Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator (SHMI) compares the deaths that occurred at a trust with the number expected given how ill its patients were; a value around 1.00 means as many deaths as expected. It is a screening tool — expressly not a death rate, not a league table, and not your personal chance of anything. A higher value is a prompt to look more closely, not a conclusion, and it cannot adjust for every difference between populations. Infection counts such as MRSA and C. difficile, and “never events” — rare, wholly preventable safety incidents like wrong-site surgery — are raw counts of uncommon events. A trust that treats far more patients will tend to record more of them, so these are not comparative scores of safety. The SHMI methodology sets out the caveats in full.
Patient experience
The Friends & Family Test asks patients how likely they are to recommend the care they received; profiles show the share who rated it good or very good. It is a voluntary survey that patients opt into, so it reflects who chose to respond rather than everyone treated, and it is not an official performance standard. Treat it as one subjective signal alongside the harder measures, not a verdict on its own.
Using the tools
- Find hospitals near you — enter your postcode to see the nearest hospitals with their waiting times, A&E performance and CQC rating.
- Use the search box at the top of any page to jump straight to a hospital or trust by name.
- Compare puts two hospitals or two trusts side by side on each official measure.
A note on the four nations
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their NHS and HSC systems separately, and each measures waiting times, A&E and cancer on a different basis— England's 18-week referral-to-treatment standard, Scotland's 12 weeks, Wales's 26 weeks and Northern Ireland's 52-week measure are simply not the same thing. This site never ranks the nations against each other, and neither should you: only compare hospitals within the same nation.
This is general information to help you use published NHS data, not medical advice. Talk through your options with your GP or the clinician looking after you.
HospitalCheck is independent and not affiliated with the NHS. For urgent help call 111; in an emergency call 999.