Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many patients aged 0 to 18 years attending accident and emergency departments in 2015-16 had a psychiatric condition.

We do not collect the information in the form requested.

People with psychiatric conditions may attend accident and emergency departments (A&E) because of the psychiatric condition, in which case the finished consultant episode will record a primary diagnosis (Diagnosis 1 in the table below). They may also attend A&E for some other reason. In such a case, the psychiatric condition may be included as a relevant diagnosis (Diagnosis 2-5 in the table below) or it may not be included at all. It is therefore not possible from the data available to NHS Digital to estimate how many patients attending A&E had a psychiatric condition.

The table below shows the number of attendances in A&E for people aged 18 or under who were recorded as having at least one diagnosis which is a psychiatric condition. This is not necessarily the same as the number of patients as people may attend more than once in a given year.

Diagnosis² 1 is primary diagnosis (ie the patient attends because of a psychiatric condition.) Others are for patients attending for some other reason but who were also diagnosed as having a mental health disorder.

Provisional³ data from the Hospital Episode Statistics published by NHS Digital is given in the table.

Notes:

1) A&E Attendance

"An attendance at an Emergency Care facility, which includes Type 1 & 2 - Consultant led A&E Departments with full resuscitation facilities, and Type 3 & 4, smaller walk in centres, out of hours and urgent care centres. These counts exclude attendances that were planned follow ups."

2) A&E Diagnosis

"Please note that the recording of the diagnosis field within the A&E data set is not mandatory. It is not known to what extent changes over time are as a result of improvements in recording practice. The diagnosis codes used are: 35 = Psychiatric conditions."

3) Provisional data

"The data are 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 data set. This shortfall will be most pronounced in the final month of the latest period, ie 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.”