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 Urgent Treatment Centres, 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.

Regular NHS performance statistics publication are scheduled for the 2nd Thursday of each month and include A&E data from the previous month. For example, the publication on August will include A&E data for July. The publication dates for future monthly statistics can be found on our 12 month calendar here.

The change to publishing frequency 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.

ECDS based data

From April 2023 , additional data sourced from the Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) has been published. These data include information on 12 hours from arrival as well as a breakdown on A&E attendances by population demographics such as Age, Gender, Ethnic Category, and Chief Complaint from Type 1 providers.

Data is available via the monthly data links below.

For details of how metrics have been constructed from ECDS, please see technical specification below.

ECDS A&E Activity & Performance Technical Specification v1.0

For information on ECDS coverage and comparisons to MSITAE, please see Data Coverage and Completeness statement below.

ECDS Supplementary Analysis Date Coverage and Completeness Statement February 2023

Clinical Review of Standards Field Test

Between May 2019 and May 2023 fourteen NHS Trusts undertook field testing of new UEC performance metrics and stopped reporting information on four hour performance. The document below provides details on the impact of the field testing on the national A&E data.

Impact of CRS on national A&E timeseries (PDF, 129K)

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.

Monthly AE Time Series August 2023 (XLS, 394K)
Quarterly & Annual Time Series (XLS, 166K)
Supplementary ECDS Analysis Time Series February 2023 onwards (XLS, 38K)

Monthly Data

Weekly Data and Quarterly Aggregates

Weekly A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2015-16
Weekly A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2014-15
Weekly A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2013-14
Weekly A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2012-13
Weekly A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2011-12
Weekly A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2010-11

Pre-Release Access List

PRA list A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions August 2023 (PDF, 90K)

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)

Contact Us

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

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

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