Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many (a) babies and (b) children have been admitted to hospital with malnutrition in each of the last 12 months for which data is available.

NHS Digital has provided a count of finished hospital admissions [1] for primary [2] and primary or secondary diagnosis [3] of 'malnutrition' for patients aged under one year old and 1-17 years old in England in each month between December 2021 - November 2022, (provisional data April-November 2022). This information is provided in the table below.

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), NHS Digital

Some health conditions can lead to malnutrition in some children. This includes eating disorders, although malnutrition itself is not an eating disorder. Through the NHS Long-Term Plan, investment in children and young people's community eating disorder services has risen every year since 2016, with an extra £54 million per year from 2022/23. This extra funding will enhance the capacity of children and young people's community eating disorder teams across the country.

Notes

[1] A finished admission episode (FAE) is the first period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider. FAEs are counted against the year or month in which the admission episode finishes. Admissions do not represent the number of patients, as a person may have more than one admission within the period.

[2] The primary diagnosis is the first of up to 20 diagnosis fields in the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data set and provides the main reason why the patient was admitted to hospital.

[3] The number of episodes where this diagnosis was recorded in any of the 20 primary and secondary diagnosis fields in a Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) record. Each episode is only counted once, even if the diagnosis is recorded in more than one diagnosis field of the record.