Hospital admissions dashboards:

• Trends
• Comparator
• Referral patterns
• Occupancy
• Patient demographics

The referral patterns dashboard benchmarks respiratory admissions data across a range of organisation types.

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Key definitions

• Admissions – number of spells of care, total continuous stay of a patient using a hospital bed after admission to hospital, can be made up of multiple episodes, including critical care. 
• Bed days – total duration of all spells of care, duration between admission date and final episode discharge date. 
• Cost – cost of entire spell of care, calculated using national tariff cost for the spell, not cost of procedure or diagnosis but reimbursement given to provider from ICS (more detail in the Reference Information p13) 
• Diagnosis Position – Primary diagnosis is the diagnosis which brought a patient into hospital Secondary diagnosis position is an existing health condition that is not the main reason for the current healthcare (i.e. underlying chronic condition). All diagnosis position is where the selected diagnosis has been coded in any position within a hospital spell.  
• Elective – the admission to hospital for treatment is from the waiting list. 
• Emergency – non-elective admission, the admission was unpredictable/unplanned and at short notice because of clinical need. 
• Episode – time a patient spends under continuous care of a consultant/healthcare professional. Multiple episodes make up a spell, i.e. an admission.  
• Patients – number of distinct patients, a patient can come into hospital multiple times for the same diagnosis. 
• Spell – total time a patient spends in hospital/under the care of the physician(s), each spell can have one or more episodes. 
• 30-day re-admission – emergency (non-elective) admission within 30 days of a previous admission 

About the data source

Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) Admitted Patient Care (APC), is an NHS data set comprising details of all admissions at NHS hospitals in England. Each record in HES includes a wide range of information including details of the patient (age, gender, geographic details), when they were treated and what they were treated for. HES is sourced from the Secondary Uses Service (SUS) database, which is collected from hospitals’ patient administration systems on a monthly basis at record level. The quality of HES data is the responsibility of the NHS providers who submit the data to Secondary Uses Service (SUS). These data are required to be accurate to enable them to be correctly paid for the activity they undertake.

Read the data disclaimer.