Malnutrition: Older People

(asked on 20th July 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many pensioners were admitted to hospital with malnutrition in (a) Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and (b) East Lancashire NHS Foundation Trust in the last 12 months.


Answered by
Steve Brine Portrait
Steve Brine
This question was answered on 25th July 2018

NHS Digital has provided a count of finished admission episodes (FAEs)1 for patients aged 60 years and over with a primary or secondary diagnosis2 of malnutrition3 to Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and East Lancashire NHS Foundation Trust4 in 2016/175. This information is provided in the following table.

Hospital provider

FAEs

RXN

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

20

RXR

East Lancashire NHS Foundation Trust

12

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), NHS Digital

Notes:

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

  1. The number of episodes where this diagnosis was recorded in any of the 20 primary and secondary diagnosis fields in a HES record. Each episode is only counted once, even if the diagnosis is recorded in more than one diagnosis field of the record.

  1. ICD-10 coding

Malnutrition:

E40 Kwashiorkor

E41 Nutritional marasmus

E42 Marasmic kwashiorkor

E43 Unspecified severe protein-energy malnutrition

E44 Protein-energy malnutrition of moderate and mild degree

E45 Retarded development following protein-energy malnutrition

E46 Unspecified protein-energy malnutrition

O25 Malnutrition in pregnancy

The presence of an ICD-10 code of malnutrition on the admission episode indicates that the patient was diagnosed with, and would therefore being treated for malnutrition during the episode of care. The cause of malnutrition is not presented here but may be due to dietary issues, an inability to absorb nutrients normally or another disease affecting the patient’s ability to feed normally.

  1. A provider code is a unique code that identifies an organisation acting as a health care provider (e.g. National Health Service trust or primary care trust). Data from some independent sector providers, where the onus for arrangement of dataflows is on the commissioner, may be missing. Care must be taken when using this data as the counts may be lower than true figures.

  1. 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.

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