Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many total bed nights children and young people stayed overnight at Stafford Hospital in each of the years (a) 2009-10, (b) 2010-11, (c) 2011-12, (d) 2012-13 and (e) 2013-14.

The information is not available in the format requested.

Information on the number of bed days for patients aged between 0 and 17 (inclusive) treated at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust for each year in 2009-10 to 2013-14 is shown in the following table.

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), Health and Social Care Information Centre

Notes:

1. Episode duration (Bed days):

Episode duration is calculated as the difference in days between the episode start date and the episode end date, where both are given. Episode duration is based on finished consultant episodes and only applies to ordinary admissions, i.e. day cases are excluded (unless otherwise stated).

2. Hospital Provider:

A provider code is a unique code that identifies an organisation acting as a health care provider (e.g. National Health Service trust or primary care trust). Data from some independent sector providers, where the onus for arrangement of dataflows is on the commissioner, may be missing. Care must be taken when using this data as the counts may be lower than true figures.

3. Assessing growth through time (Admitted patient care):

HES figures are available from 1989-90 onwards. Changes to the figures over time need to be interpreted in the context of improvements in data quality and coverage (particularly in earlier years), improvements in coverage of independent sector activity (particularly from 2006-07) and changes in NHS practice. For example, changes in activity may be due to changes in the provision of care.

4. Provisional Data:

The data is provisional and may be incomplete or contain errors for which no adjustments have yet been made. Counts produced from provisional data are likely to be lower than those generated for the same period in the final dataset. This shortfall will be most pronounced in the final month of the latest period, i.e. November from the (month 9) April to November extract. It is also probable that clinical data are not complete, which may in particular affect the last two months of any given period. There may also be errors due to coding inconsistencies that have not yet been investigated and corrected.