Accident and Emergency Attendances in England - 2009-2010, Experimental statistics

Please note (05/02/2014):The following correction was made to the Accident and Emergency Attendances in England (Experimental Statistics) 2009-10 report on 5 February 2014. A labelling error was found in charts 3.5 and 3.6; values were labelled as being for patients aged 90+, when this should have read 91+. These labels have been corrected.

Please note: 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 28 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 per cent to 17.7 per cent.
• Corrections have been made to the percentage column in Appendix 1 of the report and associated excel table, these changes are generally between 0 per cent to 0.2 per cent.
• 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.

This is the third annual publication of the Accident and Emergency (A&E) Attendance data within Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES). It covers the period April 2009 to March 2010 and draws on just over 15 million detailed records of attendances at major A&E departments, single specialty A&E departments, minor injuries units and walk-in centres in England.

Publishing the 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 data set. 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.

NHS organisations will be able to review their own data to ascertain the extent to which their local trend follows the national pattern. This can be done by using the accompanying interactive spreadsheet tool available A&E Attendances - Provider level analysis (Experimental statistics) 2009-10.xls.

The full report and accompanying tables are also available on our dedicated website HESonline, along with inpatient, outpatient and maternity data.