UK Hospitals Guide 2026: North West

The UK Hospitals Guide compares hospitals in the North West for 29 operations and conditions, using figures published by national clinical audits and the NHS. It shows how many operations each hospital does, how its results compare with what is expected, how long people are waiting, and what patients said about their care.

What the guide is

For each operation or condition there is a table of hospitals or NHS trusts in the North West with:

• Volume band: how many operations the hospital does, in bands set from the spread of all hospitals in the national data.
• Key outcome: a result such as deaths, repeat operations or complications, adjusted for the patients each hospital treats, with the banding or limits the audit itself publishes.
• Waiting time: the latest NHS referral to treatment waits for the specialty, cancer waiting times for cancer operations, and waits for related scans and tests.
• Patient experience: the trust's result in the Care Quality Commission's national patient surveys.
• CQC rating and a link to each hospital's page on this site.

How it differs from a league table

• Updated every month. Waiting times change monthly and are refreshed when NHS England publishes them. Audit results are refreshed when each audit publishes a new report.
• Outcomes, not just counts. Doing more operations is not the same as good results, so we show risk-adjusted outcomes alongside volumes.
• The source's own judgement. We only say a result is higher or lower than expected when the audit says so. We do not combine figures into a score or rank hospitals.
• NHS and private hospitals together where the data allows. The National Joint Registry covers private hospitals, so hip and knee replacement pages include them.
• Every figure has its period, source and licence. Nothing is collected from hospitals by questionnaire.
• Free. No subscription, no sign-up, no adverts on the guide data.

Choose an operation or condition

How we put it together

We use published national data only: the National Joint Registry, the National Hip Fracture Database, the National Emergency Laparotomy Audit, the Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme, the national cancer audits (bowel, breast, prostate and lung), the National Vascular Registry, NHS England's Hospital Episode Statistics and waiting time statistics, UK Health Security Agency infection data, and Care Quality Commission surveys and ratings. Each is reproduced under the Open Government Licence or a Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Some figures are for a single hospital and some for a whole NHS trust, which may run several hospitals. Each table says which. Read the methodology and data dictionary for the definitions, the volume bands and the checks we made before publishing.

This guide is information, not medical advice. Talk to your GP or consultant about your own care.

Sources

We checked this guide against these official pages on 26 October 2026.

• National Joint Registry transparency data (data.gov.uk) (National Joint Registry)
• National Hip Fracture Database annual report 2026 data (Royal College of Physicians)
• National Emergency Laparotomy Audit: eleventh annual report (NELA)
• Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme results (data.gov.uk) (SSNAP)
• National Bowel Cancer Audit State of the Nation report 2026 (NATCAN)
• National Vascular Registry 2025 State of the Nation report (VSQIP)
• Hospital Admitted Patient Care Activity 2025-26 (NHS England)
• Consultant-led Referral to Treatment Waiting Times 2026-27 (NHS England)
• Adult inpatient survey (Care Quality Commission)

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