Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people have been diagnosed with Actinic keratoses in each of the last five years.

The following table shows the count of finished admission episodes (FAEs) with a recorded primary diagnosis of 'actinic keratoses', for the years 2019/20 to 2023/24, in English National Health Service hospitals:

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics, NHS England.

Notes:

1. an FAE is the first period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider;
2. FAEs are counted against the year or month in which the admission episode finishes; and
3. the data presented here is a count of the number of admissions rather than the number of patients. It's possible that the same person may have been admitted to hospital on more than one occasion within any given period.

The majority of cases of actinic keratoses are treated by a general practitioner or elsewhere in the community, with only a small minority of cases, typically the most serious, requiring hospital admission. The data presented here will, therefore, only represent a small proportion of the total number of cases that were treated.