Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many children were admitted into NHS care for more than seven days in the latest period for which data is available.

NHS England collects data on patient discharge episodes, including for children. Discharge data does not represent the number of individual children with a hospital stay, as a child may have more than one discharge from hospital within the reporting period.

Between April 2023 and March 2024, 67,421 discharge episodes were recorded where the patient was in hospital for more than seven days and was aged between zero and 17 years old when admitted into National Health Service care.

The following table shows a count of finished discharge episodes where the patient was aged between zero and 17 years old, including both total discharges and episodes where the patient was in hospital for more than seven days, each discharge month for 2023/24, for activity in English NHS hospitals and English NHS commissioned activity in the independent sector:

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), NHS England.

Notes:

1. a discharge episode is the last episode during a hospital stay, or spell, where the patient is discharged from the hospital or transferred to another hospital. Discharges do not represent the number of patients, as a person may have more than one discharge from hospital within the period;
2. the patient age is recorded at the point of admission, and this is used to determine the most appropriate setting for the patient. For the purposes of this data, we have only included discharges where the patient was aged zero to 17 years old at the point of admission;
3. total discharges are a count of the total number of finished discharge episodes;
4. discharge month episodes have been counted against the month in which the discharge occurred. It is possible that a patient may have been admitted in a month prior to their discharge; and
5. for the financial year 2023/24, the data in the HES is held by the financial year in which the episode ends. This is to ensure that all clinical and administrative data relevant to the episode is available at the time of collection.