Liz Kendall – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Liz Kendall on 2014-06-25.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many residents of care homes presented at accident and emergency departments in England in each of the last four years.

Norman Lamb

Information is not held centrally on the number of calls to 999 made by or on behalf of residents of care homes, or the number of residents of care homes attending accident and emergency departments.

Information on the number of residents of care homes who had an emergency admission to a hospital in each of the last four years shown in the following table.

Number of finished admission episodes for emergency admissions by source of admission in England, 2009-10 to 2012-13

Source:

Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), Health and Social Care Information Centre

Notes:

1. Includes activity in English National Health Service hospitals and English NHS commissioned activity in the independent sector.

2. A finished admission episode (FAE) is the first period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider. FAEs are counted against the year or month in which the admission episode finishes. Admissions do not represent the number of patients, as a person may have more than one admission within the period.

3. Changes to the figures over time need to be interpreted in the context of improvements in data quality and coverage, improvements in coverage of independent sector activity (particularly from 2006-07) and changes in NHS practice.

4. FAEs recorded as "The usual place of residence, including no fixed abode" may contain a number of episodes where patients may have resided in care homes, subsequently designating it as their usual place of residence. Such FAEs were not recorded as admissions from a care home. The number of times this may have occurred is unknown.