The Department uses information from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) for data of this kind. HES is the national statistical data warehouse for England of the care provided by national health service hospitals and for NHS hospital patients treated elsewhere. The data are freely available from:
www.hesonline.nhs.uk
For hospital admissions for asthma the HES data are not broken down by age, but they are broken down into age categories of 0-14 years old and 15 plus years old for finished episodes of asthma. Note that a patient may have more than one episode for each hospital admission, which explains why episode data exceed admission data in the following table. Data are currently only available for the five years previous to 2006-07, collected from April to April:
Admissions Episodes (ages 0-14) Episodes (ages 15 plus) 2006-07 62,656 26,448 51,656 2005-06 59,072 22,542 51,698 2004-05 63,422 25,570 53,023 2003-04 56,698 22,125 47,992 2002-03 51,601 21,840 40,414