Ambulance waiting times, deaths registered and ICU admission rates in England

Dyddiad y datganiad:
13 July 2023

FOI REF: FOI-2023-1170

You asked

Please provide datasets for the following areas:

The waiting time for ambulances Data criteria:

  • Data for England only, segmented into individual Ambulance services
  • Monthly data for the last 5 years
  • Only Category 1 calls (immediate response to a life-threatening condition)

Minimum data requirements:

  • number of Category 1 calls in this period
  • data in minutes showing the waiting time for the ambulance to arrive at the patients address for Cat 1 patients
  • data in minutes showing the waiting time from the ambulance arriving at the hospital and the patient being admitted into E&A (or other areas) for Cat 1 patients

The number of death registries Data criteria:

  • data for England only, segmented by Public Health England Centre (UKHSA centres)
  • monthly data for the last 5 years
  • location categories: Home, Hospitals
  • break down into ICU and non-ICU, Hospices, Care Homes, other communal establishments and elsewhere.

Minimum data requirements:

  • The cause of death
  • The demographic details for each registered death (age, ethnicity, gender)

The number of turned-down ICU admission (where the ICU could not admit a patient due to lack of capacity) Data criteria:

  • England only and segmented by Public Health England Centre (UKHSA centres)
  • Monthly data for the last 5 years

Minimum data requirements: I need to know the reasons to be able to analyse data, I am looking for the following reasons:

  • Limitation of staffing
  • Unavailable hospital beds
  • Unavailable operation theatres

We said

Thank you for your request.

Death registrations

We are responsible for the provision of mortality data for England and Wales using information derived at the point of death registration.  

All the conditions mentioned on the death certificate are coded using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). From all of these causes an underlying cause of death is selected using ICD-10 coding rules.   

The underlying cause of death is defined by WHO as:  

a) the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death, or b) the circumstances of the accident or violence that produced the fatal injury 

Some of the information you have requested is available on our NOMIS webservice in annual format. 

Select period - 2013 - 2021 

Select the geography (England and Wales, regional or by local authority).   

Select Age - All ages or 5-year age bands.   

Select Gender - Total or Male/Female   

Select rates - All deaths, rates or percentage of population for example.   

Select cause of death ((ICD10) code search is available).   

Select format (Excel or CSV for example)  

We also hold the following datasets and user requested datasets that may be useful in your research; however none match your exact requirements:

Annual:

User requested datasets:

Unfortunately, we do not hold analysis of deaths registered by specific geography, place of occurrence, ethnicity, age, sex, and cause of death by month. We do not generally produce outputs at the requested geographic level by individual cause of death, single year of age, sex, ethnicity and monthly breakdown, as this information would almost certainly be personally identifiable. 

We can look into creating something similar as a custom dataset to meet your needs. Please note, such datasets are subject to disclosure controls, legal frameworks, resources and agreement to costs under the ONS Charging policy.  If you would like to discuss your requirements further and obtain a quote for this work, please contact the Health Analysis and Pandemic Insight Customer service team at Health.data@ons.gov.uk 

Please note:  

We do not hold analysis at UKHSA Centre geography breakdown and whilst we hold deaths by place of occurrence, we are unable to distinguish between ICU and non-ICU hospitals.  

Available geographies can be found in our Open Geography Portal (statistics.gov.uk)

Ambulance and ICU statistics

Unfortunately, we do not hold data for ambulance and ICU statistics.

The following alternative sources may be better placed to assist with your request: 

NHS England produce statistics relating to ambulance call outs: England Statistics » Ambulance Quality Indicators. 

NHS Digital may also be better placed to answer your enquiry regarding English data, they can be contacted on enquiries@nhsdigital.nhs.uk.

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