Hospital Accident & Emergency Activity 2020-21

This comes from the Secondary Care Uses (SUS) data warehouse containing details of accident and emergency (A&E) attendances at National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in England. It includes private patients treated in NHS hospitals, patients who were resident outside of England and care delivered by treatment centres (including those in the independent sector) funded by the NHS.

The Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) is the new national dataset for urgent and emergency care which has replaced the HES A&E dataset used to collect information from Emergency Departments across England. Implemented as part of a phased rollout of the dataset which commenced in October 2017, submitted ECDS data was mapped into a legacy HES A&E data format for national reporting during this rollout process. This was completed during the 2019-20 reporting period meaning all activity within the 2020-21 financial year was reported in the ECDS format enabling adoption of this new data source.  It enables more detailed analysis and enhanced understanding of emergency services.

This comes from the HES data warehouse containing details of all admissions, outpatient appointments and accident and emergency (A&E) attendances at National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in England. It includes private patients treated in NHS hospitals, patients who were resident outside of England and care delivered by treatment centres (including those in the independent sector) funded by the NHS.

HES datasets are the data source for a wide range of healthcare analyses for the NHS, Government and many other organisations and individuals. HES is sourced from the Secondary Uses Service (SUS) database, which is collected from hospitals’ patient administration systems monthly at record level.

Each record in HES includes a wide range of information including details of the patient (age, gender, geographic details), when they were treated and what they were treated for.

The phased rollout of the ECDS dataset which commenced in October 2017 and for which ECDS data was mapped into a legacy HES A&E data format for inclusion within HES A&E was completed during the 2019-20 reporting period. Reporting of official statistics using HES A&E format data therefore was retired in March 2020 and is only used for historic 2019-20 data as a comparison with ECDS 2020-21 data in this publication.

Additional detail regarding the phased rollout of ECDS and how this relates to historical HES A&E format data may be found in the methodological change notice.

The collection process used for MSitAE data is very different from the process used for HES. 

MSitAE are based on counts made in local NHS and Independent Sector organisations and submitted to NHS England and NHS Improvement in aggregate form, rather than from patient level data.

These are currently the official source of A&E information and should be used in preference to A&E HES where information is held in both data sets.

Learn more about MSitAE data.

The role of major A&E departments is to assess and treat patients who have serious and unforeseen injuries or illnesses. Major A&E departments are consultant-led, open 24 hours a day and 365 days a year with full resuscitation facilities. Not all hospitals have an A&E department.

In addition to major A&E departments, single specialty A&E departments, walk-in centres and minor injury units are also covered by the A&E HES data. People can attend these services without an appointment. They deal with a range of minor injuries and illnesses. All data tables include all of these groups unless otherwise stated.

Type 1 A&E department = A consultant led 24 hour service with full resuscitation facilities and designated accommodation for the reception of accident and emergency patients.

Type 2 A&E department = A consultant led single specialty accident and emergency service (e.g. ophthalmology, dental) with designated accommodation for the reception of patients.

Type 3 A&E department / Type 4 A&E department / Urgent Care Centre = Other type of A&E/minor injury units (MIUs)/Walk-in Centres (WiCs)/Urgent Care Centre, primarily designed for the receiving of accident and emergency patients.

A Type 3 department may be doctor led or nurse led. It may be co-located with a major A&E or sited in the community. A defining characteristic of a service qualifying as a Type 3 department is that it treats at least minor injuries and illnesses (sprains for example) and can be routinely accessed without appointment. An appointment based service (for example an outpatient clinic) or one mainly or entirely accessed via telephone or other referral (for example most out of hours services), or a dedicated primary care service (such as GP practice or GP-led health centre) is not a Type 3 A&E service even though it may treat a number of patients with minor illness or injury.

Records in the Emergency Care Database (ECDS) are called ‘attendances’, and each A&E attendance relates to a single visit by an individual to A&E. An individual patient may have more than one attendance in a period, so these are not the same as a count of patients. Where follow up care is required and provided by the A&E department, a second planned attendance is recorded.

A&E waiting times form part of the NHS Constitution, which contains a list of expected rights and pledges for patients that NHS England takes into account when assessing organisational delivery.

Section 3a of the NHS constitution pledges “The NHS commits to provide convenient, easy access to services within the waiting times set out in this Handbook to the NHS Constitution.” There are a number of government pledges on waiting times, including:

A maximum four-hour wait in A&E from arrival to admission, transfer or discharge;

The operational standard for A&E waiting times is that 95% of patients should be admitted, transferred or discharged within 4 hours of their arrival at an A&E department. Learn more about the NHS constitution.