This indicator measures the percentage of admissions of people who returned to hospital as an emergency within 30 days of the last time they left hospital after a stay. Admissions for cancer and obstetrics are excluded as they may be part of the patient’s care plan.
This indicator aims to measure the success of the NHS in helping people to recover effectively from illnesses or injuries. If a person does not recover well, it is more likely that they will require hospital treatment again within the 30 days following their previous admission. Thus, readmissions are widely used as an indicator of the success of healthcare in helping people to recover.
There is an ongoing review by NHS Digital of emergency readmissions and includes indicators across the frameworks. The second phase of the review is now in progress and involves significant input from a consultation group made up of a range of internal and external parties. This publication includes a number of "quick win" changes agreed by the group and the whole dataset has been backdated.
Please see the methodological change paper and new specification, linked below, for more details.
During the review the data for this indicator is designated as Experimental Statistics.
Legacy unique identifier: P01758