Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES) is a data warehouse containing records of all patients admitted to NHS hospitals in England. It contains details of inpatient care, outpatient appointments and A&E attendance records. The Kennedy report recommended that HES should be "supported as a major national resource for the monitoring of a range of healthcare outcomes".
Hospital Episode Statistics are produced and published on a monthly basis. This data is provisional and should therefore be treated as an estimate until the final National Statistics annual publications.