Mr Paul Burstow (Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Health; Sutton & Cheam, Liberal Democrat)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many heart bypass operations there were per million population in (a) England and (b) each strategic health authority in each year since 1997.

Miss Melanie Johnson (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department of Health; Welwyn Hatfield, Labour)

The information requested is shown in the table.

Heart bypass operations have increased in number over the past six years. However, angioplasty is increasingly being used to treat patients who would have undergone bypass surgery in the past and the procedures performed in national health service hospitals in England have increased from 17,291 in 1997–98 to 34,986 in 2002–03.

Notes:

1. A finished admission episode is the first period of in-patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider. Please note that admissions do not represent the number of in-patients, as a person may have more than one admission within the year.

2. Figures have not been adjusted for shortfalls in data (ie the data are ungrossed).

3. All operations count of episodes—these figures represent a count of all FCE's where the procedure was mentioned in any of the 12 (four prior to 2002–03) operation fields in a HES record. A record is only included once in each count, even if an operation is mentioned in more than one operation field of the record. Population figures are not available so only operation counts can be provided.

4. Strategic Health Authority (SHA) Data Quality—SHA data were added to historic data-years in the HES database using 2002–03 boundaries, as a one-off exercise in 2004. The quality of the data on SHA of treatment is poor in 1998–99, with over a third of all finished episodes having missing values in these years. Users of time series analysis including 1998–99 need to be aware of these issues in their interpretation of the data.

Source:

Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), Department of Health.