Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many people were recorded on a general practice register with a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in England in each year from 2009-10 to 2014-15.

The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) are able to provide the number of people recorded on the disease register and the prevalence for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), at England level from 2009-10 to 2013-14. The data for 2014/15 are not expected to be published until the end of October 2015.

As Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) registers are constructed to underpin indicators on quality of care, they do not necessarily equate to prevalence as may be defined by epidemiologists. For example, prevalence figures based on QOF registers may differ from prevalence from other sources because of coding and definitional issues.

The number of patients on clinical registers can be used to calculate disease prevalence, expressing the number of patients on each register as a percentage of the number of patients on practices’ lists. Therefore, ‘raw prevalence’ for a clinical area is defined as:

Raw Prevalence = (number on clinical register / number on practice list) *100

Table A: Prevalence of COPD at England level, 2009/10 to 2013/14

COPD Register

2013/14 1,004,920

2012/13 974,999

2011/12 938,511

2010/11 898,989

2009/10 861,341