Hospital Accident & Emergency Activity 2021-22

This section reports how the distribution of reattendances varies with the day of the week, age and gender for 2021-22. All reattendances are defined to be within 7 days of the patient’s first attendance, either to the same or another A&E department, and over 4 hours to exclude transfers between organisations.

The reason for the initial attendance and subsequent reattendance(s) have not been compared to assess whether they are related or not.

The results are presented as:

• Annual total of patients who have reattended A&E over the last 10 years

• Day of the week of the patient’s first attendance of those that have reattended

• Age and gender of patients who have reattended

In 2021-22 the number of reattendances to A&E increased by 40% from 1,390,000 in 2020-21 to 1,940,000 in 2021-22. However, this figure is slightly lower than that in 2019-20.

The number of reattendances as a proportion of all A&E attendances  has remained the same between 2020-21 and 2021-22 at slightly over 10 per cent.

The percentage of reattendances, as a proportion of first attendances, is very consistent over each day of the week varying a maximum of a quarter of a percent between any particular day in the week.

Males have a higher proportion of reattendances than females for all age groups, with the exception of those between 10 to 29 years of age.

Females between 20 to 29 years of age have the highest overall rate of reattendance across any age/gender group with a steady decrease in the ensuing age bands.

Males between 30 to 39 years of age have the highest rate of reattendance amongst men and the decrease is smaller in the ensuing age bands.

These trends could be linked to patterns of admissions, for example older people may be more likely to be admitted and conversely less likely to need to return to A&E within seven days.

Excludes attendances where patient gender is unknown.