NHS Digital has worked closely with the British Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Society (BOMSS) and NHS England to develop a methodology to define how the number of people receiving bariatric surgical procedures (reported separately for primary, revisions and gastric balloons and bubbles (temporary procedures), can be most accurately derived from HES data. The names of individual bariatric procedures in HES may not directly correspond with the names commonly used by the bariatric surgeons, so clinical input has been necessary to help overcome this. We have responded to advice from BOMSS to use a more limited code list to identify primary procedures. Whilst the methodology used to derive these statistics has been designed with this input, these numbers should be viewed as developmental until we further refine the methodology with users and stakeholders. Full details of the methodology used are in the metadata document with this release.
NHS Digital has historically published data on admissions and number of finished consultant episodes (FCEs) for bariatric surgical procedures in the National Statistics on Obesity, Physical Activity and Diet (SOPAD) publication, which uses a different methodology, as explained in the Technical notes. SOPAD counts the number of procedures and admissions for bariatric surgery , groups reporting on primary and revision procedures, excludes gastric balloons and bubbles procedures and uses a wider range of different procedure codes. Therefore, the SOPAD figures are higher than the counts of people provided in this release. SOPAD has recently been through a consultation Statistics on Obesity, Physical Activity and Diet - NHS Digital which didn’t include a revised methodology for these estimates. Therefore, as this dashboard and statistics develop, we will consider in liaison with stakeholders and users, whether they continue to be published separately from SOPAD or realign back into SOPAD, a National Statistic, as part of the combined compendia publication. In the meantime, there is a need to consider the confusion that may be caused by having two sets of statistics based upon differing methodologies You may feedback your comments on this using our customer survey here
HES data for 2021-22 is still provisional and should therefore be treated as an estimate. When the final HES National Statistics 2021-22 annual publication is released later this year, we will update the data in this dashboard.