The numbers of finished admission episodes where the primary or secondary operative procedure was a tonsillectomy for people aged (a) under 18 and (b) 18 and over in each of the last five years is set out in the following table.
Under 18 18 and over Age unknown Total 2006-07 18,695 33,905 2 52,602 2005-06 18,106 34,809 3 52,918 2004-05 17,966 34,674 3 52,643 2003-04 18,146 35,539 2 53,687 2002-03 18,541 36,321 3 54,865 Notes: FAE A FAE is the first period of in-patient care under one consultant within one health care provider. Admissions do not represent the number of in-patients, as a person may have more than one admission within the year. Data quality HES are compiled from data sent by over 300 national health service trusts and primary care trusts (PCTs) in England. The Information Centre for health and social care liaises closely with these organisations to encourage submission of complete and valid data and seeks to minimise inaccuracies and the effect of missing and invalid data via HES processes. While this brings about improvement over time, some shortcomings remain. Assessing growth through time HES figures are available from 1989-90 onwards. During the years that these records have been collected by the NHS, there have been ongoing improvements in quality and coverage. These improvements in information submitted by the NHS have been particularly marked in the earlier years and need to be borne in mind when analysing time series. Changes in NHS practice also need to be borne in mind when analysing time series. For example a number of procedures may now be undertaken in out-patient settings and may no longer be included in the HES data. This may account for any reductions in activity over time. Ungrossed Data Figures have not been adjusted for shortfalls in data (i.e. the data are ungrossed). All operations count of mentions These figures represent a count of all mentions of an operation in any of the 12 operation fields in the HES data set. Therefore, if an operation is mentioned in more than one operation field during an episode, all operations are counted. Source: Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), The Information Centre for health and social care.