Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many NHS hospital admissions resulted from violent crime in 2019.

The Department does not yet hold the collated data for 2019-20, however we have provided the data for the year 2018-19 (1 April 2018 - 31 March 2019). For defining ‘violent crime’, we have reflected the focus of the Government’s 2018 Serious Violence Strategy and provided information on assault by firearm, knife or sharp object (such as a broken bottle) and corrosive substance. The total number of finished admission episodes¹ where these were listed as the cause was 5,328.

‘Assault by bodily force’ and ‘assault by blunt object’ may also be considered as ‘violent crime’ and the number of finished admission episodes where these were listed as the cause were 18,503 and 2,387 respectively.

A breakdown of the information is shown in the following table:

Count of Finished Admission Episodes¹ where an external cause code² of assault has been recorded in 2018-19

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), NHS Digital

Notes:

¹Finished admission episodes - A finished admission episode is the first period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider. Admissions do not represent the number of patients, as a person may have more than one admission within the period.

² Cause code - This is a supplementary code that indicates the nature of any external cause of injury, poisoning or other adverse effects. Only the first external cause code which is coded within the episode is counted in HES. Recording of external cause is not mandatory and recording practice varies over time and regionally, care should be used when interpreting this data.

It should be noted that it is not possible within this dataset to classify the reason behind the assault. The information covers activity in English NHS Hospitals and English NHS commissioned activity in the independent sector.