Which Countries Have the Longest Healthcare Wait Times? (2025 Update)

Wait times have always been the defining political flashpoint of public healthcare systems. But the 2024 and 2025 data tell a story that is meaningfully different from the one that circulated a decade ago. The countries that struggled then still struggle now — but the league table has shifted, and one country that used to top the list has quietly dropped out of the international surveys altogether.

This article draws on the OECD's Health at a Glance 2025 report (published November 2025), the Commonwealth Fund's Mirror, Mirror 2024 international comparison, the 2023 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey of adults in ten countries, and the Fraser Institute's Waiting Your Turn 2024 report on Canadian wait times.

Canada: The Longest Waits in the Developed World

Canada's wait time problem has gone from bad to historically bad. According to the Fraser Institute's 2024 annual survey of Canadian physicians, the median wait time from a GP referral to receipt of specialist treatment reached 30.0 weeks in 2024 — the longest ever recorded in the survey's 30-year history, and a 222% increase compared to 1993. Orthopedic surgery patients wait a median of 57.5 weeks; neurosurgery patients wait 46.2 weeks.

The Commonwealth Fund's 2023 International Health Policy Survey of adults in ten high-income countries confirms the picture from the patient side. Only 31% of Canadians who needed to see a specialist were seen within one month — the worst result of all ten countries surveyed. In 2023, only 26% of Canadians were able to get a same- or next-day GP appointment, down from 46% in 2016 and the lowest proportion of any country in the survey. An estimated 4 million Canadian adults — roughly 14% of the adult population — reported having no regular primary care provider at all in 2023, also the lowest proportion of any country surveyed.

The OECD's Health at a Glance 2025 notes that Canada and the United Kingdom are the only two countries in the survey where more than 10% of patients reported waiting over a year for a specialist appointment.

The United Kingdom: The Steepest Decline

The UK's trajectory is arguably the most dramatic in the data. In 2013, only 14% of UK patients reported waiting more than four weeks to see a specialist — one of the better results in the Commonwealth Fund survey. By 2023, that figure had risen to 61%, the largest deterioration of any country over the decade. The UK now ranks alongside Canada at the bottom of the ten-country comparison for specialist wait times.

In the 2023 survey, 11% of UK patients waited over a year for a specialist appointment, and 19% waited over a year for non-emergency or elective surgery. The NHS waiting list in England stood at over 7 million pathways at the end of 2024, with only 58.9% of patients waiting under 18 weeks — well below the NHS's own 92% target. In Wales, the situation is worse: 4.5 pathways per 100 population were waiting more than 52 weeks, compared to 0.5 in England.

The Health Foundation's analysis of the 2023 survey data is direct: the UK has gone from being one of the best-performing countries on specialist wait times to one of the worst, driven by below-average health spending growth since 2010, the cumulative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on elective care backlogs, and persistent GP shortages.

New Zealand: Wait Times Still Rising Post-Pandemic

Most OECD countries saw their pandemic-era elective surgery backlogs begin to improve after 2022. New Zealand is one of the few exceptions. According to Health at a Glance 2025, New Zealand's waiting times for both cataract and hip replacement surgery have continued to increase on both key metrics since the pandemic — a trend not seen in most other comparable countries. The elective surgery waiting list reached 75,000+ patients in late 2023, with over 30,000 waiting more than four months.

In the 2023 Commonwealth Fund survey, New Zealand ranked among the worst countries for primary care same-day access alongside Canada, France, and Australia.

What Happened to Norway and Sweden?

The original version of this article, published in 2014, cited Norway and Sweden as among the worst performers based on the OECD's Health at a Glance 2011 report. The picture has changed for both countries.

Norway exited the Commonwealth Fund's international survey programme in 2022 and is no longer included in the main cross-country comparisons. The OECD notes that Norway's administrative wait time data is also not directly comparable to other countries because it measures from the date of GP referral rather than from specialist assessment — meaning its figures have historically appeared longer than equivalent data from other countries.

Sweden has made genuine improvements in surgical wait times. According to Health at a Glance 2025, Sweden's median wait for hip replacement surgery in 2024 was 67 days — among the shorter waits in the OECD, comparable to Spain. Sweden's challenges now lie elsewhere: after-hours primary care access is the worst of any country in the 2023 survey (only 10% of Swedish patients reported it being easy to get care outside normal hours), and the country was excluded from the equity analysis in Mirror, Mirror 2024 due to privacy law changes preventing income-related data collection.

The Countries With the Shortest Waits

For context, the countries with the best specialist access in the 2023 Commonwealth Fund survey were Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. In Germany and the Netherlands, 49–50% of patients reported getting a same- or next-day GP appointment. For specialist care, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Australia all had 46–64% of patients seen within one month — roughly double the rate in Canada and the UK.

For elective surgery, Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Sweden had median cataract surgery wait times of around 50 days or fewer in 2024. Germany and the Netherlands consistently outperform the UK and Canada on both primary and specialist care access.

Why Wait Times Matter for Expats

For expats, wait time data matters in two distinct ways. First, if you are relocating to a country with a public health system, understanding the realistic access timeline for non-emergency specialist care is essential — particularly for anyone managing a chronic condition or planning a family. Second, and more immediately relevant to most international residents, wait time data is a strong argument for maintaining comprehensive private health insurance even in countries with universal public coverage.

In Canada, the UK, and New Zealand, private health insurance can bypass public waiting lists entirely for elective procedures and specialist consultations. In Germany and the Netherlands — where public wait times are shorter — private insurance still offers faster access and broader choice of provider. In every system, the gap between what the public system delivers and what private coverage unlocks is widest precisely in the countries where public wait times are longest.

The OECD notes that "optimum waiting times are not necessarily zero" — short queues can be cost-effective when the health consequences of modest delays are minimal. But a 30-week median wait in Canada, or a seven-million-person backlog in England, is well beyond any reasonable definition of a managed queue.

If you are weighing up healthcare access as part of a relocation decision, or reviewing whether your current international health insurance is adequate, the data above gives you a realistic baseline. The countries with the shortest public wait times — Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland — also tend to have the most accessible and well-funded private insurance markets. The countries with the longest waits — Canada, the UK, New Zealand — are precisely where private coverage provides the most tangible day-to-day benefit.