Privacy

What this site collects — which is designed to be nothing — and how the little that is necessarily processed is handled.

Last updated: 12 October 2026

About this policy

This policy explains how information is handled when you use Surgery Waits.

Surgery Waits is operated by General Consulting Services Pty Ltd (ACN 658 447 280) as trustee for the Australian Business Trust (ABN 13 744 838 758) trading as National Digital (National Digital, we, us).

National Digital handles personal information consistently with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles, and applies them to this site irrespective of any exemption that might otherwise be available.

What this site is built not to collect

Surgery Waits is a static publication. It has:

• no accounts and no login — there is nothing to sign up for;
• no cookies set by the site, and nothing written to local or session storage;
• no profiling and no tracking — the site does not identify its visitors, follow them between pages or across other sites, or build any record of a person;
• one request to another host — a page counter, Cloudflare Web Analytics, which records that a page was opened. It sets no cookie, stores no identifier for you and receives nothing you type. Every other page, style, script and data file is served from this domain; no advertising, embed or font network is contacted; and
• no search terms in web addresses — what you look up in the compare tool never appears in the address bar or the browser history.

These properties are checked automatically on every change to the site, and a change that breaks one of them does not ship. The methodology describes the checks.

Searches and the printed sheet stay on your device

The compare tool runs entirely in your browser against a dataset served by this site. What you type into it is not transmitted anywhere — not to this site, and not to the page counter, which is told only the address of the page you opened, and search terms never appear in an address here. The printable take-away sheet is generated on your device and sent nowhere.

What is processed to deliver the site

Like any website, Surgery Waits is delivered over a network, and delivering it involves technical information such as your IP address and the pages your browser requests. The site is served through Cloudflare's content delivery network, which processes that connection information to deliver the site and protect it from abuse, under Cloudflare's privacy policy. Surgery Waits adds no collection of its own on top beyond the aggregate page counter described above and the usage line for AI assistants described below, and does not use per-visitor logs from its host.

The server for AI assistants

AI assistants can read the same published figures through the site's MCP server, at /mcp. It answers only from this site's own data files and sends nothing to anyone else.

For each request, the server writes one line to the log of the site's functions. Cloudflare, as this site is set up, shows this log live to someone watching it and does not store it, and the site stores nothing either. The line lets the operator count how the server is used. It holds only:

• the HTTP method (such as GET or POST), the response status, the MCP protocol version, and whether a session id was sent;
• whether the request was a batch of several calls, and how many calls it held;
• those calls counted by method and by tool, and errors counted by kind;
• the names of the arguments each tool was sent, such as "procedure" or "locality" — never what was in them;
• the name and major and minor version number of the client software, only when it is on a short list of known clients, and the product named in the user agent, only when it is on a list of known agents. Any other name is written as "other";
• whether the request came through the mcp-remote proxy, and whether it looks like a client or an automated probe.

The line never holds an IP address, the web page a browser called from, a session id, or any surgery, place, postcode or hospital that was asked about.

If you contact us

This domain deliberately sends and receives no email, and the site has no forms. The one way to reach the operator is National Digital's contact page. Information you choose to submit there is received by National Digital and used to respond to you — for example, to check a reported error against the source data.

Questions and complaints

Questions or concerns about this policy can be raised through National Digital's contact page. Independent information about privacy rights and complaints is published by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Changes to this policy

If the site ever changes in a way that affects this policy, the policy will be updated here, with its date. The automated checks above would also have to change visibly in the site's public source history.