Research & Information Services

Current Projects and Research

Matching Cancer Registration Data with Hospital Episode Statistics

Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) provides information on admitted patient care delivered by NHS organisations in England. The HES data cover all NHS trusts in England. Private hospitals are not included but private patients treated in NHS Hospitals are included.

The WMCIU has access to a subset of these data via the West Midlands Public Health Observatory. These data cover cancer patients treated in, or resident in, the West Midlands. The data are used to supplement and complement the data routinely collected by the WMCIU through linkage of the two datasets.

The additional information provided by HES can be used to answer a range of questions on:-

• diagnoses, including non-cancer diagnoses;
• hospital procedures, including procedures not routinely reported to the WMCIU;
• length of stay in hospital;
• waiting times from decision to admit to actual admission into hospital;
• method of admission and discharge to and from hospital, and
• the ethnic group of the patient.

In addition, the HES data allow external validation of the data held by the WMCIU to be undertaken by comparing the data in the two datasets.