Accident and Emergency Attendances in England (Experimental Statistics), 2009-10

This is the third publication of the accident and emergency (A&E;) attendance data within Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). It covers the period from April 2009 to March 2010 and draws on nearly 15.6 million detailed records of attendances at major A&E; departments, single specialty A&E; departments, walk-in centres and minor injury units 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.

Also, available for the first time is linked A&E; and inpatient data, showing where the patient has been admitted to hospital following their attendance at A&E.; This linkage work provides a clearer understanding of the patient and provides an additional dimension to the analysis available. Further, more detailed information around this data linkage is available within chapter 4 of the main report, a technical methodology document is also provided (link below).

Key facts

• A&E; HES data contains nearly 15.6 million A&E; attendances from April 2009 to March 2010 at major A&E; departments, single specialty A&E; departments, minor injury units and walk-in centres in England.
• Of the 91 providers that have no attendances showing under A&E; HES data, 88 of them are primary care trusts (PCTs) and 3 are trusts.
• Of these attendances, HES records that 14,443,018 (95.8%) have a duration in A&E; of 4 hours or less; within QMAE this is 20,158,291 (98.3%).
• Of all A&E; attendances, the highest percentage (39.1%) 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'.
• About 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 15 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) 2009-10]. This report provides comparisons for 3 providers. A provider can be specified as England or a Strategic Health Authority or individual providers allowing comparison at England, SHA and provider levels.
• 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 the main report are provider level comparisons relating to coverage between A&E; HES and QMAE.

Important notes

The following correction was made to the Accident and Emergency Attendances in England (Experimental Statistics) 2009-10 report on 20 January 2011:

• A minor change to table 3.13 has been made to remove a double counting error (of 197,977) in relation to the row 'Total other valid records'.

The following corrections were made to the Accident and Emergency Attendances in England (Experimental Statistics) 2009-10 report on 31 January 2011:

• An issue was corrected in tables 3.12 and 3.13 of the report, affecting the order and labelling of figures for 2009-10.
• A rounding error was corrected in table 3.15 of the report and associated excel table. The figure for '2. Discharged - follow up by GP' for 2008-09 has been corrected from 17.8% to 17.7%.
• Corrections have been made to the percentage column in Appendix 1 of the report and associated Excel table; these changes are generally between 0% to 0.2%.
• An issue was corrected in the labelling of chart 4.3 and the corresponding table 4.3 in the Excel file, the report was correct.

The new version of the report is also available to download from The IC's website [http://www.ic.nhs.uk/].

Responsible statistician

The responsible statistician for this publication is Tony Childs, Principal Information Analyst HES/SUS ([email protected], 0845 300 6016).

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