Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate he has made of the average length of stay in hospital for people with dementia in each of the last three years.

The Health and Social Care Information Centre has provided the average length of stay[1] (LOS) in days, with a primary diagnosis[2] of dementia for 2011-12 to 2013-14.

Note that this is not a count of people as the same person may have had more than one admission episode within the same time period.

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

[1] The difference in days between the admission date and the episode end date (duration of episode) or discharge date (duration of spell), where both dates are given. LOS is based on hospital stays and only applies to ordinary admissions not day cases (unless otherwise stated). Information relating to LOS, including discharge method/destination, diagnoses and any operative procedures, is based only on the final episode of the spell.

[2] The primary diagnosis is the first of up to 20 (14 from 2002-03 to 2006-07 and 7 prior to 2002-03) diagnosis fields in the HES data set