Virendra Sharma – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Virendra Sharma on 2016-07-18.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what proportion of visits to accident and emergency departments were for minor ailments in (a) England and (b) former strategic health authority areas in each year since 2006.
Mr Philip Dunne
The information is not available in the format requested. Such information as is available is attached.
NHS England publishes information on the number of attendances at all types of accident and emergency department. A type 3 accident and emergency department is one that treats minor injuries and illnesses (sprains for example) and can be routinely accessed without an appointment. In this context, minor ailments have been interpreted as a type 3 accident and emergency attendance.
Data are reported to NHS England by all organisations providing National Health Service funded emergency care services and averaging more than 200 attendees per month. It is not possible to aggregate these data to clinical commissioning group, and the 10 strategic health authorities were abolished in March 2013. Published data for type 3 attendances are only available from 2011-12 onwards. These data are presented by 13 commissioning sub-regions, which are not legal entities but are sub-divisions of NHS England.
