Provisional Monthly Hospital Episode Statistics for Admitted Patient Care, Outpatients and Accident and Emergency Data - April 2011 to January 2012

Monthly HES data for Inpatients

In the year from February 2011 to January 2012 there were:

• 17.4 million finished consultant episodes (FCEs)², 59.4 per cent (10.3 million) of which included at least one procedure or intervention, and 5.9 million of which were day cases.

14.9 million finished admission episodes (FAEs)³, of which 5.2 million were emergency admissions.
 
Monthly HES - Inpatient Clinical coding coverage

The shortfall between the most recent month's data is more pronounced when considering clinical (procedures and diagnoses) coverage. 3.4 per cent more procedures and 6.0 per cent more diagnoses were coded in the HES data submitted to SUS by 21/3/2012 (Month 11) - extract used for this publication, compared to the HES data submitted to SUS by 22/2/2012 (Month 10) used for 13th April 2012 publication.  We accordingly recommend extra caution using clinical codes for the most recent months data.
 
Monthly HES for Outpatients

In the year from February 2011 to January 2012 there were:

• 90.3 million outpatient appointments made, with 72.2 million (80.0 per cent) of these attended by the patient.
• 6.8 million outpatient appointments not attended by the patient, representing 7.5 per cent of all appointments.

Provisional Monthly HES data for Accident and Emergency (Experimental Data)

In the year from February 2011 to January 2012 there were:

• 17.0 million A&E attendances³ recorded in A&E HES. Of these 3.6 million (21.2 per cent) resulted in admission to hospital for inpatient treatment, 3.3 million (19.4 per cent) resulted in a GP follow up, and 6.6 million (38.6 per cent) were discharged with no follow up.

Topic of Interest : Payment by Results (PbR)

PbR is a system of paying NHS healthcare providers a standard national price or tariff for each patient seen or treated, taking into account the complexity of the patients healthcare needs. The admitted patient care (APC) PbR data available from HES comes from the same underlying commissioning data set (CDS) as standard inpatients HES data however it has had PbR policy rules applied to assign a standard tariff to the hospital activity.

The new figures from the Hospital Episodes Statistics PbR data show that for the 13.3 million qualifying APC spells between April 2010 and March 2011:

• Income to NHS healthcare providers was £21.3 billion.
• 10.0 per cent of patients accounted for 40.4 per cent of income whilst 1.0 per cent of patients accounted for 9.5 per cent of income.
• The age profile of the top 10.0 per cent of patients by income has a larger proportion of patients aged 60 and over (65.4 per cent) compared to that for all patients (51.3 per cent).
• The age profile of the top 1.0 per cent of patients by income is similar to that of the top 10.0 per cent except there are a higher proportion of individuals aged 9 and under (14.6 per cent) when compared against the top 10.0 per cent of patients (6.0 per cent).
• The average income per patient is £2,708, whilst it is £11,150 for the top 10.0 per cent of patients by income and £26,180 for the top 1 per cent.
• Females account for over half (55.6 per cent) of the income of £21.3 billion whilst accounting for 57.0 per cent of spells. Patients aged 60 and over make up approximately 51.1 per cent (£10.9 billion) of the total income whilst accounting for 43.3 per cent of all spells.
• For acute NHS providers the average price per spell was £1,588, varying from a low of £1,148 to a high of £4,271.
• The acute NHS providers with the highest average price per spell are specialist centres or hospitals with a high level of specialist activity providing care for groups such as children and cancer patients.