Hospitals: Discharges
(asked on 4th January 2022) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many Delayed Transfers of Care were recorded in the NHS in England in (a) January 2016, (b) July 2016, (c) January 2017, (d) July 2017, (e) January 2018, (f) July 2018, (g) January 2019, (h) July 2019, (i) January 2020, (j) July 2020, (k) January 2021 and (l) July 2021.
The collection and publication of data on delayed transfers of care (DToC) was paused in March 2020 to release capacity across the National Health Service to support the COVID-19 pandemic response. Therefore data on DTOCs in each of the last six months is not available.
Monthly data on the number of DTOCs in England is not held in the format requested. NHS England and NHS Improvement’s data collection is based on the average number of people delayed per day. This is calculated by dividing the number of delayed days during the month by the number of calendar days in the month. This measure was previously known as DToC beds. The following table shows the average number of delayed discharges in England in the NHS and social care until January 2020.
Date | Average number of delayed discharges |
January 2016 | 5,144 |
June 2016 | 5,771 |
January 2017 | 6,371 |
June 2017 | 5,929 |
January 2018 | 4,883 |
June 2018 | 4,503 |
January 2019 | 4,368 |
June 2019 | 4,502 |
January 2020 | 5,183 |
Since 9 December 2021, NHS England and NHS Improvement have published weekly data on daily discharge figures across England. This is the first published data on hospital discharges since the DToC collection was paused in March 2020 and is available at the following link: