Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many people under the age of 18 were admitted to hospitals in England and Wales for incidents of self-harm in 2014.

There were 19,577 finished admission episodes of people aged 0-17 admitted to hospitals in England and Wales in which an external cause of intentional self-harm or self-poisoning was listed between 1 April 2013 and 31 March 2014.

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. Only the first external cause code which is coded within the episode is counted in hospital episode statistics (HES). Recording of external cause is not mandatory and recording practice varies over time and regionally, care should be used when interpreting this data.

Source: HES data 2013-14