Update of HES Data - March 2019

The inpatient hospital data have been updated to include English data up to March 2017 and Scottish data up to October 2016.

Please read the following information before downloading episode level hospital data via the HES Data Portal.

Important changes to existing hospital data

Amendments to how UK Biobank handles duplicate records means some records that were previously available might not be present in the updated dataset.
In particular, we have revised our procedures to remove unfinished episodes which are superceded by a completed episode.
A small number of records have been removed from participants who have requested that no further health records data be linked.
The indexing of records and spell_ids may differ from those present in previously released datasets.

We therefore recommend that researchers working with the episode-level data download all the hospital data they require afresh, rather than appending the newly available records to their existing hospital data.

Newly available data

New fields providing information on the source of the hospital record have been added to Data Showcase. Please see data-fields: 40022 and 41254 which correspond with data-field dsource in hesin. More detailed source information is provided in data-fields: 41253 and 41252 which correspond with data-field source in hesin.
OPCS3 coded operation/procedures data for older Scottish hospital records are now available.
Additional data is present for some previously available hospital records (where encodings have been extended to include new values).

We have created new summary HES data-fields that provide the date each diagnosis/procedure was first recorded across all hospital episodes

Researchers undertaking analyses where they require information on when a particular diagnosis or procedure was first recorded in the hospital data (e.g. to select cases and controls) but do not require further details about these hospital admissions might want to use the newly added Summary Information data-fields (see below), rather than working with the more complex episode-level data. These data fields are available in the Data Showcase, i.e. not the HES Data Portal.

Coverage	Clinical codes		Corresponding dates
Coverage	Data-field	Description	Data-field	Description
Primary diagnoses only	41202	Diagnoses - main ICD10	41262	Date of first in-patient diagnosis - main ICD10
Primary diagnoses only	41203	Diagnoses - main ICD9	41263	Date of first in-patient diagnosis - main ICD9
Diagnoses recorded in any position (i.e. primary or a secondary diagnosis)	41270	Diagnoses - ICD10	41280	Date of first in-patient diagnosis - ICD10
	41271	Diagnoses - ICD9	41281	Date of first in-patient diagnosis - ICD9
Primary procedures	41200	Operative procedures - main OPCS4	41260	Date of first operative procedure - main OPCS4
Primary procedures	41256	Operative procedures - main OPCS3	41257	Date of first operative procedure - main OPCS3
Procedures recorded in any position (i.e. primary or a secondary procedure)	41272	Operative procedures - OPCS4	41282	Date of first operative procedure - OPCS4
	41273	Operative procedures - OPCS3	41283	Date of first operative procedure - OPCS3