Hospital Admitted Patient Care Activity 2019-20

This comes from the HES data warehouse containing details of all admissions, outpatient appointments and accident and emergency (A&E) attendances at National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in England. It includes private patients treated in NHS hospitals, patients who were resident outside of England and care delivered by treatment centres (including those in the independent sector) funded by the NHS.

HES datasets are the data source for a wide range of healthcare analyses for the NHS, Government and many other organisations and individuals. HES is sourced from the Secondary Uses Service (SUS) database, which is collected from hospitals’ patient administration systems on a monthly basis at record level.

Each record in HES includes a wide range of information including details of the patient (age, gender, geographic details), when they were treated and what they were treated for.

Records in the HES Admitted Patient Care (APC) database, which form the basis of this publication, are called ‘hospital episodes’, and each hospital episode relates to a period of care for a patient under a single consultant within one hospital provider. A stay in hospital from admission to discharge is called a ‘spell’ and can be made up of one or more episodes of care. This publication looks at completed episodes, called Finished Admission Episodes (FAEs), which is the first episode in a spell of care, and Finished Consultant Episodes (FCEs), which is a continuous period of care under one consultant.

From 2016-17 onwards, Adult Critical Care (ACC) is a subset of APC data. An Intensive Care Unit (ICU) or High Dependency Unit (HDU) ward in a hospital, known as a critical care unit, provides support, monitoring and treatment for critically ill patients requiring constant support and monitoring to maintain function in at least one organ, and often in multiple organs. Medical equipment is used to take the place of patients’ organs during their recovery.

Some critical care units are attached to condition-specific treatment units, such as heart, kidney, liver, breathing, circulation or nervous disorders. Others specialise in neonatal care (babies), paediatric care (children) or patients with severe injury or trauma.