Luciana Berger – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2014-06-26.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many people aged (a) under 18 and (b) 18 years and over were admitted to hospital with a condition related to alcohol misuse in each year since 2010.

Jane Ellison

The attached tables contain the sum of the estimated alcohol attributable fractions (AAFs) for admissions for patients aged (a) 0-17 years and (b) 18 years and over for the years 2010-11 to 2012-13.

It should be noted that these figures are not a count of people and represent an estimated number of admissions that were attributable to alcohol.

AAFs are based on the proportion of a given diagnosis or injury that is estimated to be attributed to alcohol. Some diagnoses or injuries will, by definition, be wholly attributable to alcohol and have an AAF of one, others will only be partly attributable to alcohol and have an AAF greater than zero, but less than one. Diagnoses or injuries that are not attributable at all to alcohol will have an AAF of zero.

These figures are derived by summing all AAFs for the relevant admissions and should, therefore only be interpreted as an estimate of the number of admissions that can be attributed to alcohol.

In addition, partial AAFs are not applicable to children aged under 16 years, therefore figures for this age group relate only to wholly – attributable admissions.

The Health and Social Care Information Centre – Statistics on Alcohol: England, 2014 report manually implemented new methodology against the 2012-13 data in their report. However, no change to the underlying Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data has been currently made.