Hospital Episode Statistics: Admitted Patient Diagnoses in England

Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) contains records of all patients admitted to NHS hospitals in England. The data is provided by NHS Digital and covers English NHS hospital stays and NHS-commissioned activity in the independent sector. This specific annual dataset is broken down to the diagnoses and external causes level.

Use Cases

• Analyze trends in hospital admissions based on diagnosis codes mentioned in the description
• Study the prevalence of specific diseases or conditions based on national patient care records
• Model healthcare resource allocation based on annual, national-level diagnosis statistics

Strengths

• Covers all patient admissions to NHS hospitals in England, suggesting a complete national picture
• Provided by the authoritative source NHS Digital, indicating official data provenance

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to data from England only

Provenance

Source

NHS Digital

Collection Method

Administrative records from hospital admissions

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:33:09.278513; freshness should be verified

Geography

England