How going private actually works in Scotland

In Scotland, generally not. The hospitals priced on this site — Ross Hall in Glasgow, Albyn in Aberdeen, Kings Park in Stirling, Spire in Edinburgh and Nuffield Health in Glasgow — are separate private hospitals in their own buildings.

What overlaps is the staff, not the premises.

Often, yes. The Scottish Parliament’s research service notes that the ability to do some private work has always been part of the NHS consultant contract. So the consultant who would eventually treat you on the NHS may well be the one who treats you privately, in a different building, sooner.

This is the strongest argument against going private, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one.

The version usually given is that it’s the same surgeons, so time spent on a private list is time not spent on an NHS one. That is true but incomplete, and someone who works in this corrected us on it.

Operating theatre slots are constrained by far more than surgeons. They need anaesthetists, theatre nursing and operating department practitioners, and there is a shortage of both. Then they need beds, either on a ward or in day surgery. Most surgeons reportedly want more NHS operating days than they are offered. So “private work diverts surgeons” is too simple a story about a bottleneck that sits across several staff groups and the estate at once.

That doesn’t dissolve the argument — private lists still draw on some of the same finite people. It does mean the honest version is more complicated than either side usually puts it.

We can’t settle that with the data on this site, and we don’t try to. This site takes no position on whether anyone should go private — there is no recommended option, no “best value” badge, and the NHS side is shown with exactly the same weight as the private side.

No, and this is the most important caveat on the site.

The Public Health Scotland figures we use measure inpatient and day case waits — the time from being placed on a list for treatment to actually receiving it. They do not include the wait to see the specialist who puts you on that list in the first place.

So the journey usually runs: GP referral, then a wait for an outpatient appointment, then a decision to treat, then the wait our figures describe. A reader in NHS Grampian described roughly a year for the first leg and another year for the second. Our number would have shown only the second.

Treat every wait on this site as the final leg, not the total. If you have not yet seen a specialist, your overall wait is longer — potentially much longer — than the figure shown. More on what the published figures mean.

Everyone who never got onto a list in the first place.

These are waiting list statistics. If your GP declined to refer you, if you were referred and rejected as not meeting the threshold, or if you live somewhere the service has been suspended or closed, you do not appear anywhere in them. The list only counts people the system has already accepted.

That is not a small group. Some boards have stopped offering certain services entirely, so a wait of zero and a service that does not exist look identical in the published data. Where we know a board has stopped providing something, the site says so rather than showing a blank — but we only know where somebody has established it, usually through a freedom of information request.

Anyone who gives up and pays is missing too, and for a worse reason. Leaving the list removes you from the still-waiting count, and never being treated on the NHS keeps you out of the completed one — so the wait simply stops being recorded. A reader who waited four years and nine months for a hip before going private appears in none of these numbers. The longest waits are the likeliest to end that way, which pulls every figure here down.

So treat every figure here as the wait among people who got onto the list and stayed on it. The picture for everyone else is worse, and nobody publishes it. This caveat is owed to ADHD Scot, who made the point while FOI-ing all fourteen boards for ADHD and autism waits — services excluded from the dataset used here.

Because Public Health Scotland publish two, and neither of them answers the question you actually have. The toggle on every comparison page switches between them. What each measure counts, and why both read low.

Which of the two reads higher depends on the specialty. Across every board and specialty here, the still-waiting figure is the larger one about six times in ten — overwhelmingly so for general surgery and urology, but the other way round for orthopaedics and ophthalmology.

This site defaulted to “people already treated” until August 2026, on the reasoning that the other measure understated things. That ignored the bias in the one we were showing. Several readers told us the figures looked far too low before anyone checked. The default now shows the queue you would be joining, because that is nearer the question people arrive with — not because it is the true number. There isn’t one.

Because most boards publish a different statistic, and almost always one that reads longer.

NHS Tayside, for instance, publish the number of weeks nine out of ten patients waited over the last three months. That is a 90th percentile, and it is the figure this site shows underneath the median as “one in ten is still waiting at…”. Tayside urology runs 40 weeks on the median here and 146 at the 90th percentile — same list, same data, two honest numbers about nine times apart at the tail.

There is a second difference. A board quoting recent waits is describing people it has already seen. This site defaults to people still on the list, which is a different group of patients altogether.

If our number looks low against your board’s, check which statistic each is. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions. The 90th percentile is the better one to quote if you want to know how bad it gets rather than what the middle looks like.

No. Every figure here is planned care.

Public Health Scotland define this dataset as covering patients added to a waiting list — for a day case or inpatient admission, or for an outpatient appointment. Someone brought in after an accident is admitted rather than added to a list, so they never enter these numbers. The specialty is simply named “Trauma & Orthopaedics” because that is what the department is called.

This matters if you are comparing against private treatment, since private hospitals do planned work almost exclusively. If trauma were mixed in it would drag the NHS figures down and flatter the comparison.

PHS don’t state this in so many words — it follows from their definition of the waiting list rather than from an explicit exclusion. Obstetrics, mental health and homeopathy are explicitly excluded.