Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many children and young people were treated as inpatients at Stafford Hospital in each of the years (a) 2009-10, (b) 2010-11, (c) 2011-12, (d) 2012-13 and (e) 2013-14.

The information is not available in the format requested.

Information on numbers of finished admission episodes (FAEs) of patients aged between 0 and 17 (inclusive) that were treated at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust for each year in 2009-10 to 2013-14 is shown in the following table.

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

Notes:

1. FAEs:

An 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.

2. This is a total of admissions and will therefore include those admitted as a day case.

3. Hospital Provider:

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.

4. 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, changes in activity may be due to changes in the provision of care.

5. Provisional Data:

The data is provisional and may be incomplete or contain errors for which no adjustments have yet been made. Counts produced from provisional data are likely to be lower than those generated for the same period in the final dataset. his shortfall will be most pronounced in the final month of the latest period, i.e. November from the (month 9) April to November extract. It is also probable that clinical data are not complete, which may in particular affect the last two months of any given period. There may also be errors due to coding inconsistencies that have not yet been investigated and corrected.