Discharge delays (Community)
Weekly returns are collected from community trusts through the community discharge situation report (SitRep).
Daily data are collected about patients residing in and discharges from community providers, and a weekly snapshot is collected about patients who have remained in hospital since the ‘no longer meeting the criteria to reside’ decision was made.
These publications contain data which has been set up for COVID-19 incident management and collected on a rapid turn-round basis from the NHS. The speed of the collection only permits minimal validation to be undertaken but the data is considered ‘fit-for-purpose’ as NHS management information.
Background and Scope
Data are shown at national, regional, system and provider organisation level. The published monthly data include:
- Daily numbers of patients:
- Who no longer meet the criteria to reside;
- Who were discharged;
- Not discharged by the end of the day despite no longer meeting criteria to reside.
- A weekly average snapshot number of additional days in total patients have remained in hospital since the criteria to be discharged decision was made (14+ days, and 21+ days length of stay)
- Weekly snapshot average of the total number of people per day with length of stay 14 days or over who no longer meet the criteria to reside but were not discharged, broken down by the reasons why they continued to reside
- Month total number of patients discharged by their intended discharge destination
This SitRep collects data for all inpatients 18 and over in NHS commissioned bedded services within the community for the purposes of physical health recovery and rehabilitation. This includes:
- NHS Community Trusts
- Acute Trusts that also provide community services which include community hospitals (with only their community hospital beds covered by this data collection)
- Mental Health Trusts that provide physical health community services which include community hospitals (with only their community hospital beds covered by this data collection)
- Community Interest Companies and others who provide physical health community services and community hospitals beds
- Care Homes where physical health recovery and rehabilitation services are provided in 10 or more beds
Other collections
Discharge delays (Acute) data for 2022/23
Weekly timeseries acute discharge delays data for the 2022/23 winter period
Please note the discharge delays (acute) monthly publication and weekly acute discharge delays timeseries figures are likely to differ as monthly publications data can be revised prior to publication where as weekly publications data do not undergo a revisions process.
Delayed Transfer of Care (DTOC) page contains information relating to delays
The DTOC metric is no longer being collected and publication has therefore ceased. The last publication of these data was for delays occurring in February 2020, published on 9th April 2020. The DTOC data is not comparable with community discharge delays data published on this page but does offer historic data on patients and days delayed at provider organisation level.
Data
Monthly publication
March 2024: Community-discharge-sitrep-monthly-data-webfile-March2024
February 2024: Community-discharge-sitrep-monthly-data-webfile-February2024
January 2024: Community-discharge-sitrep-monthly-data-webfile-January2024
December 2023: Community-discharge-sitrep-monthly-data-webfile-December2023
November 2023: Community-discharge-sitrep-monthly-data-webfile-November2023
October 2023: Community-discharge-sitrep-monthly-data-webfile-October2023
September 2023: Community-discharge-sitrep-monthly-data-webfile-September2023
August 2023: Community-discharge-sitrep-monthly-data-webfile-August2023-revised – please note an updated version of this file has now been published as one week of data was missing from Table 3 and data for two providers was missing from 28th – 31st August
July 2023: Community-discharge-sitrep-monthly-data-webfile-July2023
June 2023: Community-discharge-sitrep-monthly-data-webfile-June2023
Monthly time-series from October 2022 onwards
Community-discharge-sitrep-timeseries-data-webfile-October2022-March2024
Notes:
August 2023 – revised data files uploaded due to some errors in the original file
October 2023 – Data collection was updated on 23/10/23 to gather more detailed information about discharge pathways and delay reasons. Some questions were discontinued, while others were introduced.
From February 2024 this collection is moving to a new analyst team, please note the new contact email below.
Pre-release access list
Contact
For further information about the published statistics, please contact us at:
Email: england.nhsdata@nhs.net