1. This work uses data provided by patients and collected by the NHS as part of their care and support.Secondary care data is taken from the English Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database produced by NHS England, Copyright © 2024, NHS England. Re-used with the permission of NHS England. All rights reserved.

2. HES Data must be used within the licencing restrictions set by NHS England, which are summarised below. HSJ Information (formerly Wilmington Healthcare Limited) accept no responsibility for the inappropriateuse of HES data by your organisation.

2.1. One of the basic principles for the release and use of HES data is to protect the privacy and confidentiality of individuals. All users of HES data must consider the risk of identifying individuals in their analyses prior to publication/release.

2.1.1. Data should always be released at a high enough level of aggregation to prevent others being able to ‘recognise’ a particular individual. To protect the privacy and confidentiality of individuals, HSJ Information have applied suppression to the HES data – ‘*’ or ‘-1’ represents a figure between 1 and 7. All other potentially identifiable figures (e.g. patient numbers, spell counts) have been rounded to the nearest 5.

2.1.2. On no account should an attempt be made to decipher the process of creating anonymised data items.

2.2. You should be on the alert for any rare and unintentional breach of confidence, such as responding to a query relating to a news item that may add more information to that already in the public domain. If you recognise an individual while carrying out any analysis you must exercise professionalism and respect their confidentiality.

2.3. If you believe this identification could easily be made by others you should alert a member of the HSJ Information team using the contact details below. While appropriate handling of an accidental recognition is acceptable, the consequences of deliberately breaching confidentiality could be severe.

2.4. HES data must only be used exclusively for the provision of outputs to assist health and social care organisations.

2.5. HES data must not be used principally for commercial activities. The same aggregated HES data outputs must be made available, if requested, to all health and social care organisations, irrespective of their value to the company.

2.6. HES data must not be used for, including (but not limited to), the following activities:2.6.1. Relating HES data outputs to the use of commercially available products. An example being the prescribing of pharmaceutical products

2.6.2. Any analysis of the impact of commercially available products. An example being pharmaceutical products

2.6.3. Targeting and marketing activity

2.7. HES data must be accessed, processed and used within England or Wales only. HES data outputs must not be shared outside of England or Wales without the prior written consent of HSJ Information.

2.8. If HES data are subject to a request under the Freedom of Information Act, then HSJ Information and NHS England must be consulted and must approve any response before a response is provided.

3. 2023/24 HES data are provisional and may be incomplete or contain errors for which no adjustments have yet been made. Counts produced from provisional data are likely to be lower than those generated for the same period in the final dataset. This shortfall will be most pronounced in the final month of the latest period, e.g. September from the April to September extract. It is also probable that clinical data are not complete, which may in particular affect the last two months of any given period. There may also be errors due to coding inconsistencies that have not yet been investigated and corrected.

4. ICD-10 codes, terms and text © World Health Organization, 1992-2024

5. The OPCS Classification of Interventions and Procedures, codes, terms and text is Crown copyright (2024) published by NHS England, licensed under the Open Government Licence.

6. GP Prescribing and Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF) data are published by NHS England and licensed under the Open Government Licence. Secondary Care Medicines Data (SCMD) are published by the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) and licensed under the Open Government Licence.

7. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. A copy of the Open Government Licence is available at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/open-government-licence.htm

8. No part of this database, report or output shall be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of HSJ Information Ltd. Information in this database is subject to change without notice. Access to this database is licensed subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated in any form without prior consent of HSJ Information Ltd.

9. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this database, HSJ Information Ltd makes no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability or suitability of the data. Any reliance you place on the data is therefore strictly at your own risk. Other company names, products, marks and logos mentioned in this document may be the trademark of their respective owners.

10. You can contact HSJ Information by telephoning 0845 121 3686, by e-mailing:

engagement@hsjinformation.co.uk or by visiting www.hsjmarketintelligence.co.uk