Guide
What do NHS waiting time figures actually mean?
Public Health Scotland publish two waiting time measures, and the difference between them is large enough to change what you would decide.
Completed waits count how long people treated in a given month had already waited. Ongoing waits count how long people currently on the list have waited so far.
Both of them read low
Completed waits leave out everyone still on the list — which means the people waiting longest are precisely the ones excluded from the figure.
Ongoing waits include people referred last week, who count as a one-week wait even though months remain ahead of them.
So neither is the number people actually want, which is how long someone joining a list today will end up waiting. Nobody publishes that.
The gap is not academic. General surgery at NHS Grampian reads about 7 weeks on the completed measure and 23 on the ongoing one.
The wait before the wait
There is a second gap. The inpatient and day case figures usually quoted only start once you have been listed for treatment. Getting an outpatient appointment with the consultant who lists you is a separate wait that comes first and is reported separately.
Quoting only the second leg describes part of the journey rather than all of it.
Who is missing entirely
These are waiting list statistics, so anyone who never got onto a list does not appear. If your GP declined to refer you, if you were assessed as not meeting a threshold, or if you live somewhere the service has been suspended, you are not counted anywhere.
A wait of zero and a service that does not exist look identical in the published data.
Treat every published waiting figure as the wait among people the system has already accepted. The picture for everyone else is worse, and nobody measures it.
Want the figures for your own health board? Compare waits and prices where you live — free, like everything else here. There is also a paid report that assembles all of it for one board and specialty.