Hospital Admitted Patient Care Activity, 2023-24

This publication reports on Admitted Patient Care activity in England for the financial year 2023-24.

This report includes but is not limited to analysis of hospital episodes by patient demographics, diagnoses, external causes/injuries, operations, bed days, admission method, time waited, specialty, provider level analysis and Adult Critical Care (ACC). It describes NHS Admitted Patient Care Activity, Adult Critical Care activity and performance in hospitals in England.

The data sources for this publication are Hospital Episode Statistics (HES).

Further details can be found on the supporting information.

This comes from the HES data warehouse containing details of all admissions and outpatient appointments 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 on a monthly basis 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.

Records in the HES Admitted Patient Care (APC) database, which form the basis of this publication, are called ‘hospital episodes’, and each hospital episode relates to a period of care for a patient under a single consultant within one hospital provider. A stay in hospital from admission to discharge is called a ‘spell’ and can be made up of one or more episodes of care. This publication looks at completed episodes, called Finished Consultant Episodes (FCEs), which are periods of care under one consultant at a single provider. A stay in hospital from admission to discharge, also known as a spell, can be made up of one or more FCEs. The first episode in any spell is known as the Finished Admission Episode (FAE).

From 2016-17 onwards, Adult Critical Care (ACC) is a subset of APC data. An Intensive Care Unit (ICU) or High Dependency Unit (HDU) ward in a hospital, known as a critical care unit, provides support, monitoring and treatment for critically ill patients requiring constant support and monitoring to maintain function in at least one organ, and often in multiple organs. Medical equipment is used to take the place of patients’ organs during their recovery.

Some critical care units are attached to condition-specific treatment units, such as heart, kidney, liver, breathing, circulation or nervous disorders. Others specialise in neonatal care (babies), paediatric care (children) or patients with severe injury or trauma.

Accident and Emergency Care activity is reported in separate publication series. It includes data from Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) and the Monthly Situation Reports (MSitAE).

The quality of HES data is the responsibility of the NHS providers who submit the data to SUS. These data are required to be accurate to enable them to be correctly paid for the activity they undertake. NHS England has a well-developed data quality assurance process for the SUS and HES data and the data quality of provisional data is reported monthly to improve the quality before the annual finalisation. Details about the quality of HES data can be found on the supporting information page and the monthly data reports are available.

For the 2023/24 publication, the following is a list of the outputs in the publication.

Summary tables

Publication excel tables:

- ICB of responsibility.

- Diagnosis.

- External Causes.

- Hospital Providers.

- Main Specialty and Treatment Specialty. (previously two files)

- Procedures and Interventions.

- Adult Critical Care (ACC).

- Demographics: Ethnicity and Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). 

- Metadata

Open data csv files:

- Provider-level Analysis csv. (includes ICB of responsibility)

- Open data: diagnosis

- Open data: procedures and interventions

- Open data: other. (includes external cause, demographics and specialty)