Statistics on Public Health, England 2023

This third release includes updated affordability and expenditure measures to 2023.

Smoking mortality data has not yet been updated as using the current methodology, it is not possible to accurately estimate smoking related mortality during the pandemic periods. OHID are currently exploring options for producing a more reliable estimate.  Mortality outputs will be updated once this estimate is available.

Admissions data production is also being paused.

The publication will then be routinely updated in the autumn each year.

We value your opinions on this new look publication and would welcome your feedback.

The timeseries relating to admissions for drug-related mental and behavioural disorders has not been included in this publication.

Mental health providers have historically submitted to both HES and to the Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS).  To reduce the burden on these providers it was decided that while they are mandated to submit to MHSDS they are not also required to submit the same activity to HES.  Some providers who previously submitted to HES have now stopped doing so.

As a result, the admissions for drug-related mental and behavioural disorders timeseries is impacted and is potentially misleading and therefore it has not been included.

Work will be undertaken ahead of the next full publication to identify ways to mitigate this issue.

The National Obesity Audit (NOA) reports on a number of measures relating to patients undergoing bariatric surgerical procedures and based on different and more recently defined groups of OPCS-4 codes than has been found in this publication.

We are looking to align the OPCS-4 codes used in this publication, to report on admissions activity, to match those used in the NOA. Further details are available within the Methodological Change paper.

The publication of hospital admissions attributable to smoking for years up to 2019/20 used the relative risk ratios from diseases used by Hughes and Atkinson in the report "Choosing Health in the South East: Smoking", which was published in 2005 and based on an update of a 1996 epidemiological study.

This, and future publications, use a more contemporary methodology based on the Royal College of Physician's Report "Hiding in Plain Sight", that was published in 2018 and agreed as part of PHE's "Consultation on proposed changes to the calculation of smoking-attributable mortality and hospital admissions" from 2020.

We have used this methodology to back date the time series within this publication.