Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many hospital admissions in the last 12 months have been related to complications arising from Type 2 Diabetes.

This data is not collected. Primary diagnosis is recorded on admission to hospital, but not the complications which may have led to the admission. Where a patient is known to have diabetes, this will always be recorded on their Hospital Episode Statistic (HES) record, regardless of the actual reason for their admission.

It should be noted that where a patient is known to have diabetes this will always be recorded on their HES record, regardless of the actual reason for their admission. Within HES, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th Revision code E11 is used to diagnose type 2 diabetes, so it is possible to provide a count of admissions where that is the primary diagnosis. However, this cohort will only comprise a small proportion of the total number of occasions where a complication of type 2 diabetes necessitated that the patient be admitted to hospital since, in most instances where a patient has diabetes, the primary diagnosis is likely to be recorded as something else.

There will be many other conditions that could be, but they won’t necessarily actually be complications of type 2 diabetes. For example, the National Health Service website page Complications of type 2 diabetes - NHS mentions ‘stroke’ as something that can potentially be caused by having diabetes. However, where a patient who has diabetes has been admitted to hospital with a stroke, we cannot say for certain whether this was a complication of their having type 2 diabetes or was caused for some other reason. Since diabetes, where known to be present, is always recorded on the patient record, we cannot assume that where it is recorded, the primary diagnosis will be due to a complication arising from it. For this reason, we cannot provide any meaningful data to answer the query.