Summary

This is the second annual publication of the Accident and Emergency (A&E) Attendance data within Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES). It covers the period April 2008 to March 2009 and draws on nearly 13.8 million detailed records of attendances at major A&E departments, single specialty A&E departments, minor injuries units and walk-in centres in England.

Publishing the A&E HES data, as experimental statistics, enables initial conclusions to be presented for discussion and aims to promote and highlight the uses of this potentially rich data set. During the period covered by this publication, not all providers have completed data submissions and data quality is poor in some cases.

The publication also includes analysis of the A&E HES data compared to the Quarterly Monitoring of Accident and Emergency (QMAE) return, the official source of A&E information, to highlight areas for further investigation.

NHS organisations will be able to review their own data to ascertain the extent to which their local trend follows the national pattern. This can be done by using the accompanying interactive spreadsheet tool available above A&E Attendances - Provider level analysis (Experimental statistics) 2008-09.xls.

The full report and accompyaning tables are also available on our dedicated website HESonline, along with inpatient, outpatient and maternity data.

Key facts

• A&E HES data contains nearly 13.8 million A&E attendances from April 2008 to March 2009 at major A&E departments, single specialty A&E departments, walk-in centres and minor injury units in England.
• Of the 95 providers that have no attendances showing under A&E HES data, 84 of them are primary care trusts (PCTs).
• Of these attendances, HES records that 12,352,871 (93.1 per cent) have a duration in A&E of 4 hours or less; within QMAE this is 19,208,874 (98.1 per cent).
• Of all A&E attendances, the highest percentage 39.8 per cent, were discharged as 'Discharged - no follow up'. Of those patients discharged within the final 10 minutes of the 4 hour wait target, the highest proportion (64.7 per cent) were recorded as 'Admitted / became a lodged patient'.
• The average (mean) attendance time in the A&E department, from arrival to departure was 2 hours 12 minutes, which is 1 hour 48 minutes quicker than the 4 hour wait target.