Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many patients have been diagnosed with malnutrition on admission to hospital since December 2019.

Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database indicates that there were 701 finished admission episodes (FAEs) with a primary diagnosis of malnutrition and 7,966 FAEs with a secondary diagnosis between December 2019 and October 2020 which is the latest data available.

However, it should be noted that HES data is based on a count of hospital episodes rather than numbers of patients, one patient may account for more than one hospital episode. Additionally, data from April 2020 onwards is provisional at this time.