A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions

The Weekly and Monthly A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions collection collects the total number of attendances in the specified period for all A&E types, including Minor Injury Units and Walk-in Centres, and of these, the number discharged, admitted or transferred within four hours of arrival.

Also included are the number of Emergency Admissions, and any waits of over four hours for admission following decision to admit.

Data are shown at provider organisation level, from NHS Trusts, NHS Foundation Trusts and Independent Sector Organisations.

From August 2017 our regular NHS performance statistics publication scheduled for the 2nd Thursday of each month will include A&E data from the previous month. For example, the publication on August 10th 2017 will include A&E for July 2017, in addition to June 2017; and thereafter data will continue to be published one month sooner. The publication dates for future monthly statistics can be found on our 12 month calendar here.

The timetable change was made in response to the Office for Statistics Regulation at the UK Statistics Authority writing in February 2017 to NHS England, NHS Improvement and NHS Digital, highlighting concerns about the timeliness of publication of data. Details of this correspondence can be found here

A fuller analysis of the A&E data across NHS England and NHS Digital is available in the form of an annual report. This report draws on A&E data from both the Monthly A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions Sitrep published by NHS England and the annual Hospital Episode Statistics dataset published by NHS Digital. The Hospital Episode Statistics data set is based on patient level data and so can be broken down in numerous ways that the Monthly Sitreps data cannot. This includes breakdowns of attendances and admissions by age and by diagnosis. The 2021-22 annual report can be found here. In addition, NHS Digital publishes monthly quality indicators which can be found here.

England Time Series

In addition to the monthly data we have provided quarterly and monthly time series for users that require data over longer periods. It should be noted however that for periods prior to June 2015 both data sets are derived from a previous weekly collection.

The quarterly time series consists of 13 week aggregates for the periods from 2011-12 to Quarter 1 of 2015-16. Quarters after Quarter 1 of 2015-16 are based on aggregates of three calendar months. The Monthly time series prior to June 2015 is an estimate generated by apportioning the weekly totals based on how many days of the week fell into a particular month. This was produced in order to provide comparisons to months in previous years and should only be considered as an estimate.

Actual data for the A&E activity prior to June 2015 can be found in the weekly time series here.

As a result of the NHS England and NHS Improvement organisational restructure, the mapping of Provider to system and region have changed for 2021-22.

Time series

Following user feedback, we have made some changes to the time series files. There are now two monthly time series files: one unadjusted data until April 2019, another adjusted for CRS pilot sites which will continue to be updated on a monthly basis.

Unadjusted: Monthly A&E Time series April 2019 (XLS, 364K)
Adjusted Monthly A&E Time Series February 2023 (XLS, 415K)
Unadjusted: Quarterly & Annual Time series (XLS, 100K)
Adjusted-Quarterly-Annual-Time-Series (XLS, 162K)

Clinical Review of Standards Field Test

Please see note below on the publication updated from May 2019 onwards.

Publication of May A&E data (PDF, 440K)

Archived Quarterly A&E data

A&E Data was also collected quarterly up until Q2 2011-12. The data collection started in 2001-02 and contains a more detailed breakdown of A&E data.
Quarterly A&E data can be found here

Guidance

A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions Monthly Return Definitions v5.0 (August 2020)

A&E performance back on track

Letter issued by NHS England and NHS Improvement to the health service regarding action to get A&E performance back on track.

Contact Us

For further information about the published statistics, please contact us at:

Performance Analysis (UEC)
NHS England
Room 5E15
Quarry House
Leeds LS2 7UE
Great Britain
Email: england.nhsdata@nhs.net

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