Publication, Part of Hospital Outpatient Activity
Hospital Outpatient Activity 2022-23
National statistics, Accredited official statistics
About this publication
This publication reports on Outpatient activity in England for the financial year 2022-23.
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 during financial year 2021-22.
The data sources for this publication are Hospital Episode Statistics (HES).
Hospital Episode Statistics (HES)
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.
Appointments
Records in the HES Outpatient database are called ‘appointments’. There is one row per appointment, regardless of whether or not it is attended. Appointments which are attended are called ‘attendances’. A patient is often invited to a series of appointments, the first of which is known as the ‘first appointment’. An individual patient may have more than one series of attendances in a given period, so first appointments are not the same as a count of patients.
Each record in HES includes a wide range of information including details of the patient (age, gender, geographic regions), when they were treated and what they were treated for.
This National Statistics publication releases some high-level analyses of HES data relating to outpatient appointments in NHS hospitals.
Data Quality
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. The points below show data quality information for this annual release.
Missing data: Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust (RDU) were unable to submit complete data from June 2022-March 2023 which has impacted the national counts – users are advised to take this into account particularly when seeking to interpret trends over time and comparisons between regions due to the impact of this missing data. More detail about this issue can be found on the supporting information page and national total estimates can be found in the summary excel output.
Outputs included
The summary report contains the following tables, charts or graphics:
- Outpatient appointment numbers and percentages for selected attendance types, 2012-13 to 2022-23
- Number and proportion of selected outpatient attendance types from total appointments by Commissioning Region, 2022-23
- Outpatient attendances by age and gender (incl. maternity specific attendances), 2022-23
- Rate of 1st attendance and Did not attends (DNA) by ethnicity (grouped) for every 100,000 population by ethnicity and proportion against all attendances, 2022-23
- Rate of 1st attendance per 100,000 population by IMD decile, 2022-23.
- Five treatment specialties with the greatest number of attendances with the corresponding did not attends, 2022-23
Data has been condensed from 11 tables down to 6.
Excel tables
- All Attendances
- First Attendances
- Main Procedures and Interventions
- Main Specialty
- Primary Diagnosis
- Treatment Specialty
- Ethnicity
- Indices of Multiple Deprivation
- Metadata
Open data csv files
- Provider Level Analysis
- All and First Attendances
- Demographic Data
- Main Speciality and Treatment Speciality
- Primary Diagnosis and Main Procedure
Last edited: 21 September 2023 9:31 am