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Country, Strategic Health Authorities, NHS Trusts, Hospital Trusts, Independent Sector Health Care Providers
Date Range:
01 Apr 2017 to 31 Mar 2018
Page contents
Summary
This is a publication on Accident and Emergency (A&E) activity in English NHS hospitals and English NHS-commissioned activity in the independent sector. This annual publication covers the financial year ending March 2018. It contains final data and replaces the provisional data that are published each month.
This is a joint publication between NHS Digital and NHS England. This collaboration enables data to be brought together from two different sources enabling inclusion of a wider set of breakdowns and measures and a more complete picture to be presented.
The data sources for this publication are Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions Monthly Situation Reports (MSitAE).
This publication releases some high level analyses of both HES and MSitAE data relating to A&E attendances in NHS hospitals, minor injury units and walk-in centres. It includes analysis by patient demographics, time spent in A&E, distributions by time of arrival and day of week, arriving by ambulance, performance times, waits for admission and re-attendances to A&E within 7 days.
The following additional analyses are included in this report for the first time:
• Comparison of 4 hour and 12 hour waits between the four home nations, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales
• A&E attendances by Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD)
• A&E attendances by ethnicity
Additional exploratory analyses have also been included as part of this release that seek to review reported data quality to inform future uses of the data.
Key Facts
• In 2017-18 there were 23.8 million attendances in Accident and Emergency. This is an increase of 2 per cent compared with 2016-17 and 22 per cent since 2008-09.
• For 2017-18, 88 per cent of patient attendances spent 4 hours or less in A&E.
• There were around twice as many A&E attendances (3.0 million attendances) for the 10 per cent of the population living in the most deprived areas compared with the least deprived 10 per cent (1.4 million attendances)
• England had the second highest reported A&E attendance rate amongst the home nations with 27,639 attendances per 100,000 population. Northern Ireland were the highest with 34,820 attendances per 100,000 population. This relates to Type 1/Major A&E departments.