Rise In NHS Hospitals Admissions In England

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 13 Dec 2007 - 1:00 PDT

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Admissions to NHS hospitals in England increased during 2006/7, a report by The Information Centre for health and social care revealed yesterday.

Elective admissions (for planned, booked or waiting list procedures) increased by four per cent to 6.2 million, while day case admissions increased by six per cent to 4.4 million.

The report; Hospital Episode Statistics (admitted patient care) for England 2006/7; also found the number of emergency admissions rose by one per cent to 4.7 million.

Meanwhile the average hospital stay continued a downward trend, falling slightly from 6.6 days to 6.3 days. Around half of all admitted patients underwent an operation and some of the most common procedures included:

- 289,590 cataract operations (one per cent more than the previous year)
- 89,254 hip replacement operations (five per cent more than the previous year)
- 59,769 percutaneous transluminal operations (coronary angioplasty) (eight per cent more than the previous year)

The report analysed 14.8 million hospital care records (three per cent more than in 2005/6) collected by The IC on its Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database.

It found two thirds of NHS patients waited less than three months for an elective operation, while there was also a reduction in the number who waited more than six months.

Patients waited an average of 73 days from when the decision to admit them was made to when they were admitted, a reduction of five days from the previous year.

The HES time waited findings are not adjusted for self-deferrals or periods of medical or social suspension, unlike published waiting list statistics.

Hospital Episode Statistics are a national resource of information on the full range of in-patient care and provide the NHS with essential information to monitor activity, improve performance and plan future services. They are used to inform the annual health check of NHS services carried out by The Healthcare Commission and are an essential source of data for Public Health Observatories.

http://www.hesonline.nhs.uk

Notes:

The Information Centre (The IC) is England's authoritative, independent source of health and social care information. It works with more than 300 health and social care providers nationwide to provide the facts and figures that help the NHS and social services run effectively. Its role is to collect data, analyse it and convert it into useful information which helps providers improve their services and supports academics, researcher, regulators and policymakers in their work.

The IC also produces a wide range of statistical publications each year across a number of areas including: primary care, health and lifestyles, screening, hospital care, population and geography, social care and workforce and pay statistics.

HES can be used to derive information on both numbers of hospital admissions and numbers of Finished Consultant Episodes (FCEs). Patients usually have a single FCE in their stay, but sometimes a patient can have more than one FCE once admitted. As well as supporting activity such as accountability to Parliament, figures are used for performance monitoring including performance rating indicators for Acute Trusts, Mental Health Trusts and Primary Care Trusts.

Time waited statistics from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) are not the same as the published waiting list statistics. HES provides counts and time waited for all patients admitted to hospital within a given period and calculates the time waited as the difference between the admission and decision to admit dates. Unlike published waiting list statistics, HES time waited is not adjusted for self-deferrals or periods of medical/social suspension. The published waiting list statistics count those waiting for treatment on a specific date and how long they have been on the waiting list.

This publication covers hospital inpatient and day case activity delivered by the NHS and as such does not provide a picture of NHS activity in other settings (within primary or ambulatory). The IC has also started to collect patient level outpatient data via the commissioning dataset. These outpatient data for 2005-6 were released in May 2007 with 2003/4 and 2004/5 data released on an experimental basis in July 2006.

The Information Centre For Health And Social Care