Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many hospital admissions in England were classified as relating to injuries or accidents as a result of firework displays in each year since 2015.

A count of finished admission episodes (FAEs) with a cause code of firework injury for each year from 2015-16 to 2019-20 is shown in the following table:

Activity in English National Health Service hospitals and English NHS commissioned activity in the independent sector

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics, NHS Digital

Notes:

A FAE is the first period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider. FAEs are counted against the year or month in which the admission episode finishes. Admissions do not represent the number of patients, as a person may have more than one admission within the period.

Cause Code

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.

W39 - Firework injury

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, apparent reductions in activity may be due to a number of procedures which may now be undertaken in outpatient settings and so no longer include in admitted patient HES data. Conversely, apparent increases in activity may be due to improved recording of diagnosis or procedure information.

It should be noted that HES include activity ending in the year in question and run from April to March, e.g. 2012-13 includes activity ending between 1 April 2012 and 31 March 2013.