Baroness Greengross – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Greengross on 2014-05-06.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of the potential savings to the National Health Service and social services of providing care for lymphoedema and lipoedema patients from the time of diagnosis.

Earl Howe

Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data does not separately identify those cases of lymphoedema that are associated with cancer from those that are not, and is unable to identify cases of lipoedema as there is no coding available for this condition, based on the tenth revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).

Further to this, HES data is not linked to costing information and therefore this information cannot be provided.

In the following table we have provided the number of finished admission episodes (FAEs) for patients with a primary diagnosis of lymphoedema from 2010-11 to 2012-13.

Note:

An FAE is the first period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider. FAEs are counted against the year or month in which the admission