Geographical disparities in health present important research and policy challenges. Disparities can be indicative of different forms of spatially patterned advantage or disadvantage. Local age and sex-standardised hospital admissions rates can provide insights into health disparities and may act as input into health geographic research or local policy instruments, such as Joint Area Health Needs Assessments (JSNAs).

Content

28 CSV files. These are age and sex-standardised morbidity rates for 27 categories of health conditions plus one category of alcohol-related conditions, per MSOA, per financial year (FY), for FYs 1999/00 – 2013/14. The reference population is the 2001 England population as recorded in the Census that year.

The 27 health conditions are derived from the 4-digit ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases v.10) codes recorded in Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). The codes have been aggregated to 20 categories used by the WHO’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, 7 additional groups not captured by the GBD and derived from the U.S. Clinical Classification System (CCS) aggregation level 1. Alcohol-related conditions are defined by the Nuffield Trust.

Morbidity rates have been estimated in two variants: crude rates (observed cases / expected cases) and spatially smoothed using a Bayesian spatial structural model estimated separately for each year.

Morbidity rates in the data have been derived from in-patient local age and sex-standardised hospital admission rates provided by HES to contribute to studies of geographical health disparities. The reference population for data is the 2001 England population as recorded in the Census 2001.

Quality, Representation and Bias

The data represent in-patient data for HES. HES has near-complete coverage of NHS commissioned hospital admissions in England. Coding of diagnoses may vary in consistency but has been validated for research and auditing purposes in an earlier study.
The estimates only related to events recorded in a hospital setting. They do not include out-patient data, events recorded in primary care and data on self-rated health.