Hospital Accident & Emergency Activity 2020-21

The NHS Digital website contains more background information about ECDS:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/data-collections-and-data-sets/data-sets/emergency-care-data-set-ecds

A Statement of Administrative Sources is also published, as required by the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. More information on the background and purpose of the Statement of Administrative Sources can be found at:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/find-data-and-publications/statement-of-administrative-sources

NHS England and NHS Improvement compiles A&E attendances and emergency admissions data through a central return that is split into two parts:

• A&E Attendances: This collects the number of A&E attendances, patients spending greater than 4 hours in A&E from arrival to discharge, transfer or admission and the number of patients delayed more than 4 hours from decision to admit to admission.
• Emergency Admissions: This collects the total number of emergency admissions via A&E as well as other emergency admissions (i.e. not via A&E).

The above data items are split by the following categories of A&E department:

• Type 1 Department (Major A&E Department).
• Type 2 Department
• Type 3 A&E department / Type 4 A&E department / Urgent Care Centre

Detailed descriptions of the A&E department types can be found on the Introduction Section of this document.

NHS Trusts, NHS Foundation Trusts, Social Enterprises and GP Practices submit data to NHS England and NHS Improvement via the NHS Digital Strategic Data Collection Service (SDCS). The Strategic Data Collection Service (SDCS) is a secure data collection system which accepts uploads of submissions in a variety of formats. Once data is submitted and signed-off, NHS England performs central validation checks to ensure good data quality.