Data Collection
Information on Emergency Department (ED) attendances across Scotland is collected and maintained by ISD on the national data warehouse known as the A&E data mart. Data is collected on local systems, then extracted and submitted to the data mart soon after the end of each month. All sites that provide emergency care are required to submit data to the A&E data mart.
There are two types of data submitted to the A&E data mart; episode and aggregate level data. The larger hospitals with ED's generally submit episode level data containing a detailed record for each attendance. Smaller sites such as Minor Injury Units (MIU) or Community hospitals generally only submit aggregate level data. The smaller sites only submit total monthly attendance figures as they do not have the information systems and support to enable collection of detailed patient based information. Consequently, detailed analysis can only be conducted on sites providing episode level data.
Sites are classed as either one of two different types of site;
- ED - Emergency Departments: sites that provide a 24 hour Emergency Medicine consultant led service.
- MIU/Other - sites including minor injuries units, small hospitals and health centres in rural areas that carry out emergency department related activity and are GP or Nurse led. They may or may not be open 24 hours.
A list of sites providing emergency care in Scotland is available in the table below;
- ED site list [42kb]
PDF 
[33kb]
Winter Pressures
ISD provides information to the Scottish Government to review the performance of the NHS which includes information from Emergency Departments.
Emergency Hospital Admissions
General information on all Emergency hospital admissions can be found here.
A&E Injuries Surveillance project
ISD have been commissioned by Scottish Government to improve on the data collection and recording of patients who attend A&E with an injury. Nationally in the NHS we currently only know details about the more serious injuries i.e. those that are admitted to hospital (see below). A number of A&E departments have agreed to provide additional data (that they already collect) and others have agreed to start collecting data (once the IT is in place). The information submitted will be used to inform injury prevention and analysis will be provided back to the departments, Scottish Government and other agencies e.g. ROSPA.
If you would like more information or would like to discuss participation please contact Ken Nicholson (email: Kenneth.Nicholson@nhs.net)
Injuries publication
Unintentional injury is one of the main causes of death and is one of the common causes of emergency hospital admissions in children. Unintentional injuries are also a common cause for emergency hospital admissions among adults. The term "unintentional injury" is preferred to "accidents" as the latter implies events are inevitable and unavoidable whereas a high proportion of these incidents are now regarded as being preventable. Unintentional injuries can occur in any age group, but children and the elderly are more vulnerable.
The latest statistical release was published on the 14th December and can be found on the Emergency Care Publications page.
This release updates information on:
- emergency hospital admissions as a result of an unintentional injury up to financial year ending 31 March 2010
- deaths caused by unintentional injury up to year ending 31 December 2009
A&E Publication Consultation
The Unscheduled Care Information Programme has completed its consultation on the publication of Emergency Department information. This consultation was sent out to colleagues across Health, Social Care and Government and received vast positive feedback. The respondents ranged from Senior Nurses to EM Consultants and from Analysts to Directors.
The consultation finished on 5th November 2010. The findings of the consultation are here [490kb].
The full consultation document is here Consultation on Emergency Department Statistics Final Oct 2010 [250kb]
The findings show that there is great demand and interest in Emergency Department statistics in Scotland. It is planned to take a variety of steps to address this gap including making more statistics available as management information via A&E SHIS, inclusion of comparative data in ISD Navigator tool and adding information to the existing A&E 4 hour wait publication.
If you would like any more information or have any queries please contact Ken Nicholson (email: Kenneth.Nicholson@nhs.net).
