Accident and Emergency Attendances in England (Experimental Statistics), 2008-09

This is the second annual publication of accident and emergency (A&E) attendance data within Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES). It covers the period April 2008 to March 2009 and draws on nearly 13.8 million detailed records of attendances at major A&E departments, single specialty A&E departments, minor injury units and walk-in centres in England.

Publishing A&E HES data, as experimental statistics, enables initial conclusions to be presented for discussion and aims to promote and highlight the uses of this potentially rich dataset.

During the period covered by this publication, not all providers have completed data submissions and data quality is poor in some cases. The publication also includes analysis of the A&E HES data compared to the Quarterly Monitoring of Accident and Emergency (QMAE) return, the official source of A&E information, to highlight areas for further investigation.

Key facts

• A&E HES data contains nearly 13.8 million A&E attendances from April 2008 to March 2009 at major A&E departments, single specialty A&E departments, minor injury units and walk-in centres in England.
• Of the 95 providers that have no attendances showing under A&E HES data, 84 of them are primary care trusts (PCTs).
• Of these attendances, HES records that 12,352,871 (93.1%) have a duration in A&E of 4 hours or less; within QMAE this is 19,208,874 (98.1%).
• Of all A&E attendances, the highest percentage (39.8%) were discharged as 'discharged - no follow up'. Of those patients discharged within the final 10 minutes of the 4-hour wait target, the highest proportion (64.7%) were recorded as 'admitted / became a lodged patient'.
• Three quarters of patients in A&E were seen and treated or admitted within three hours.
• The average (mean) attendance time in the A&E department, from arrival to departure, was 2 hours 12 minutes.
• The hour beginning 10am was the most popular time to visit A&E, though on week days there was also a further, though less pronounced, peak of attendances in the hour beginning 6pm.

Detailed analysis of A&E attendances at provider level is available within the supporting excel document [A&E Attendances - Provider level analysis (Experimental statistics) 2008-09]. This report provides comparisons for a provider and the England figures or between two providers.

The information presented within this report has been extracted from accident and emergency data submitted to HES (Hospital Episode Statistics). Where a provider is not listed this is because data has not been submitted to A&E HES.

Also provided within Appendix 1 of this report are provider level comparisons relating to coverage between A&E HES and QMAE.

Responsible statistician

The responsible statistician for this publication is Tony Childs, Principal Information Analyst HES/SUS (enquiries@ic.nhs.uk, 0845 300 6016).

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