Luciana Berger – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2015-12-14.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many patients attending A&E departments aged 0 to 18 years in 2014-15 were diagnosed with psychiatric conditions in 2014-15.

Alistair Burt

18,673 accident and emergency (A&E) attendances by patients aged 0 to 18 had a diagnosis of a psychiatric condition in 2014-15.

Notes:

1. These figures are from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES).

2. A&E Diagnosis

The main diagnosis recorded for A&E attendances. Please note that the recording of the diagnosis field within the A&E data set is not mandatory. It is not known to what extent changes over time are as a result of improvements in recording practice. The following codes were used in this enquiry: 35 = Psychiatric conditions

3. Provisional data

The data are provisional and may be incomplete or contain errors for which no adjustments have yet been made. Counts produced from provisional data are likely to be lower than those generated for the same period in the final data set. This shortfall will be most pronounced in the final month of the latest period. It is also probable that clinical data are not complete, which may in particular affect the last two months of any given period. There may also be errors due to coding inconsistencies that have not yet been investigated and corrected.

4. Official source of A&E activity data

HES is not the official source of total A&E activity, this is the NHS England Situation Reports Collection-

http://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/ae-waiting-times-and-activity/

However, HES permits further analysis of A&E activity as there are a range of data items by which HES can be analysed.