NHS FOI Tracker

Why most NHS trusts aren't in this dataset at all

24 August 2026

If you're looking for FOI responses from your local hospital trust, you won't find them here — and it's worth explaining why, because it shapes everything else on this site.

GOV.UK's FOI feed is a central government channel

NHS trusts and foundation trusts are their own statutory organisations, and in practice each one runs its own FOI disclosure log on its own website, not on GOV.UK. GOV.UK's Freedom of Information release feed is where central government departments, executive agencies and arm's-length bodies publish — not the 200-plus individual trusts that actually run hospitals and community services. Our companion Policing & Justice tracker has the same gap for the 43 territorial police forces, for the same structural reason.

So what's actually here?

The largest single source in our dataset is, perhaps surprisingly, Monitor — the sector regulator for NHS foundation trusts in England, which was merged into NHS Improvement in 2016 and no longer exists as a separate body. Its 261 tracked releases, mostly from 2015–2017, are still some of the richest trust-level material we have: FOI responses about specific trusts' leadership, patient safety incidents, bed availability dashboards, and agency staff use. Because Monitor's job was literally overseeing foundation trusts, its FOI log ends up being a proxy — an imperfect, dated one — for the trust-level detail that individual trust websites would otherwise provide.

Beyond Monitor, our coverage centres on:

  • The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) — medicines and device regulation, our single largest current source (see our piece on the MHRA's weekly FOI releases).
  • The Department of Health and Social Care — health policy at the department level.
  • Public Health England (until its 2021 replacement by the UK Health Security Agency) — public health and outbreak-related requests.
  • The NHS Pay Review Body and Office of Manpower Economics — NHS pay policy.

What this means for using this site

Treat this tracker as a window into national health policy and regulation FOI activity, not into what any specific hospital is doing. If you want FOI responses from a specific trust, its own website's disclosure log — not GOV.UK, and not us — is the right place to start. We link to methodology details like this on every site precisely so the scope is clear rather than assumed. See our about page for more.