Summary

Description

This is the fourth annual publication of the Accident and Emergency (A&E) Attendance data within Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES). It covers the period April 2010 to March 2011 and draws on 16.2 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 can 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 Provider level analysis file. The full report and accompanying tables are also available on our dedicated website HESonline, along with inpatient, outpatient and maternity data.