Publication, Part of Hospital Accident & Emergency Activity

Hospital Accident & Emergency Activity 2019-20

Official statistics

Publication Date:: 10 Sep 2020
Geographic Coverage:: England
Geographical Granularity:: Country, Strategic Health Authorities, NHS Trusts, Hospital Trusts, Independent Sector Health Care Providers
Date Range:: 01 Apr 2019 to 31 Mar 2020

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Introduction

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 2020. 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 also included in this report:

• 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.

Total A&E attendances

In 2019-20 there were 25 million attendances in Accident and Emergency

This is an increase of 1 per cent compared with 2018-19 and 17 per cent since 2010-11

Total time spent in A&E

For 2019-20, 84 per cent of patient attendances spent 4 hours or less in A&E

A&E attendances in deprived areas

A&E attendances twice as high for people in the most deprived areas as in the least deprived

There were nearly twice as many attendances to A&E departments in England for the 10% of the population living in the most deprived areas (3.1 million), compared with the least deprived 10% (1.6 million)

Home Nations Comparison

England had the third highest reported Type 1 A&E attendance rate amongst the home nations

England had 28,089 attendances per 100,000 population. Northern Ireland were the highest with 35,047 attendances per 100,000 population