Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the (a) mean and (b) median waiting time for treatment in Queen Alexandra Hospital's accident and emergency department was in each year from 2009-10.

The information is shown in the following table.

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) Analysis Team at the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

Notes:

1. Mean and median – The mean (average) and median (middle in ranking when all values are sorted in order) duration in minutes to assessment, treatment or departure.
2. The information supplied was available by Trust rather than by individual A&E Department and therefore the Department has supplied information on Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust as a whole rather than Queen Alexandra Hospital A&E specifically.
3. Duration to assessment – The total amount of time in minutes between the patient's arrival and their initial assessment in the A&E department. This is calculated as the difference in time from arrival at A&E to the time when the patient is initially assessed.
4. Duration to treatment – The total amount of time in minutes between the patient's arrival and the start of their treatment. This is calculated as the difference in time from arrival at A&E to the time when the patient began treatment.
5. Duration to departure – the total amount of time spent in minutes in the A&E department. This is calculated as the difference in time from arrival at A&E to the time when the patient is discharged from A&E care. This includes being admitted to hospital, died in the department, discharged with no follow up or discharged - referred to another specialist department.
6. Hospital provider - A provider code is a unique code that identifies an organisation acting as a health care provider (eg NHS 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.
7. Assessing growth through time (A&E) – HES figures are available from 2007-08 onwards. Changes to the figures over time need to be interpreted in the context of improvements in data quality and coverage and changes in NHS practice. For example, changes in activity may be due to changes in the provision of care.
8. Data quality – The recording of duration in HES A&E is not mandatory and this may particularly have affected the quality of recorded durations to assessment and treatment.