Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many confirmed hospital admissions for influenza there have been in each year since January 2019.

The information is not held in the format requested.

Public Health England records cases of severe influenza with data from a sentinel network of National Health Service trusts which report voluntarily on a weekly basis on hospitalisation to all levels of care for laboratory confirmed influenza. However, as this data comes from a sentinel network of trusts, a stable network of trusts that participate every season and commit to providing weekly data, it is therefore not designed to capture all hospitalisations of influenza in England.