🚑 Provisioning of the HES Accident and Emergency dataset 🚑

In the most recent batches of data, the date coverage of the HES A&E dataset now ends in March 2020 (the end of the financial year 2019/2020), whereas other HES datasets continue to have up to date coverage.

For example, the HES Admitted Patient Care has coverage up to around January 2025, with the typical 3-month lag from the April 2025 provisioning date.

Officially, the HES A&E dataset ended with the 2019/2020 financial year (in March 2020) with the Emergency Care DataSet (ECDS) taking over, but up until April’s data provisioning the HES A&E dataset was being updated for historical continuity.

Unfortunately, NHS England have confirmed that this will no longer be the case going forward and instead researchers will now have to make use of ECDS for the most recent data.

There are strengths and limitations of HES A&E and ECDS and the choice of which to use or whether to combine and use both might depend on the project and the use case.

For more detailed coding one might prefer to use the SNOMED codes and diagnosis qualifier in ECDS. For more derived fields or greater historical coverage one might use HES A&E, which starts in 2007 compared to 2018 for ECDS. It is worth noting that the coverage of ECDS does not look to be complete until April 2020, when dataset officially took over, and then looks more complete than HES A&E from April 2021. Therefore combining the two datasets might be appropriate in some cases.

Please note that the curated assets have been curated using the 2025-02-04 archived_on batch of HES AE