Statistics on Public Health, England 2023

This publication is a combination of four previous publications:

• Statistics on Alcohol,
• Statistics on Drug Misuse,
• Statistics on Obesity, Physical Activity and Diet,
• Statistics on Smoking.

Following the first edition of this combined publication, and publication of updates to the hospital admissions and affordability and expenditure measures in December 2023, this publication provides updated prescribing data for 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23. 

We would welcome feedback on this new look publication.

The publication is broken down by data source and within that the domains as follows:

• Part 1: Hospital Admissions - for all lifestyle domains, though Alcohol is sourced from Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID).
• Part 2: Mortality - for the Smoking domain only.
• Part 3: Prescriptions - for Alcohol, Obesity and Smoking.
• Part 4: Affordability and Expenditure - Alcohol and Smoking.
• Part 5: Other Data Sources - for all lifestyle domains.

This report presents newly published information on the affordability of and expenditure on alcohol and the number of prescribed items dispensed to treat alcohol dependency.

Due to changes in how the prescription data is processed and held by the NHS Prescription Services, time series data for prescriptions is provided from 2014/15 onwards only.

Data on the number of hospital admissions for diseases, injuries and conditions that can be attributed to alcohol consumption are produced by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities in their Local Alcohol Profiles for England, which use data from NHS England’s Hospital Episode Statistics.

Additionally, the report provides links to information relating to alcohol use and misuse drawn from a variety of sources including alcohol-specific deaths; drinking behaviours among adults and children and road casualties involving illegal alcohol levels.

This report presents newly published information on hospital admissions attributable to drug-related mental health and behavioural disorders and on hospital admissions attributable to poisoning by illicit drugs.  Note that the time series for drug-related mental health and behavioural disorders have not been included, please see the Data Quality Statement.

The report also provides links to information on drug misuse among both adults and children from a variety of sources, including the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System and the Crime Survey for England and Wales.

This report presents newly published information on obesity-related hospital admissions and the number of prescription items provided in primary care for the treatment of obesity. 

Due to changes in how the prescription data is processed and held by the NHS Prescription Services, time series data for prescriptions is provided from 2014/15 onwards only.

The report also provides links to information on obesity, physical activity and diet from a variety of sources, including the Health Survey for England, the National Diet and Nutrition Survey and Sport England’s Active Lives surveys.

This report presents newly published information on smoking including:

• Smoking-related hospital admissions from NHS England's Hospital Episode Statistics (HES).
• Affordability of tobacco and expenditure on tobacco using ONS economic data.
• Prescriptions to help people quit smoking using NHS Prescription Services data.

Three years of new data have been provided for hospital admissions and prescriptions (2020/21 to 2022/23), and for affordability and expenditure (to 2022).

The report also provides links to information on smoking by adults and children drawn together from a variety of sources.