The importance of knowing context of hospital episode statistics when reconfiguring the NHS

As part of an educational initiative to support frontline staff to better understand the importance of accurately capturing and coding patient episodes, we reviewed freely available data from HESonline.1 2 We found some interesting statistics. On average, 1600 adults aged over 30 apparently attend outpatient child and adolescent psychiatry services in England each year (figure⇓). Indeed, the number of adults attending outpatient paediatric services since 2003 has increased …