Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many patients stayed at an NHS hospital in England for seven days or longer in 2017.

Information is shown in the following table which is a count of finished discharged episodes (FDEs)¹ with a spell duration² of seven days or longer in National Health Service hospitals for the financial year 2016-17.

This is a count of hospital episodes, not individual patients, as the same person may have been admitted into an NHS hospital on more than one occasion.

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics, NHS Digital

Notes:

1. A FDE indicates whether the episode is a finished discharge episode (whether the patient was discharged at the end of the episode).
2. The difference in days between the admission date and the discharge date, where both dates are given.