Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-01-18.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many people under 18 have been admitted to hospital as a result of self-harm in each year since 2010.

Alistair Burt

While information on the number of children and young people admitted to hospital as a result of self-harm is not available, the table below shows the total number of admissions in each year from 2009-10 to 2014-15.

The table provides a count of finished admission episodes with an external cause of self-harm and a patient age between 0-17 years for 2009-10 to 2014-15. This is a count of admissions, not people as the same person may have been discharged on more than one occasion during the same year.

Source Hospital Episode Statistics data

In 2013, specific guidance around the recording of self-harm codes on patients admitted via accident and emergency was issued to all providers. This may explain the increase between 2012-13 and 2013-14; which means that figures between these two years cannot be fairly compared.