COVID-19 Wider Impacts - Emergency Department Activity

Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a new strain of coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China. Clinical presentation may range from mild-to-moderate illness to pneumonia or severe acute respiratory infection.

The COVID-19 pandemic has wider impacts on individuals’ health, and their use of healthcare services, than those that occur as the direct result of infection. Reasons for this may include:

• Individuals being reluctant to use health services because they do not want to burden the NHS or are anxious about the risk of infection.

• The health service delaying preventative and non-urgent care such as some screening services and planned surgery.

• Other indirect effects of interventions to control COVID-19, such as mental or physical consequences of distancing measures.

This dataset provides a weekly summary of people attending A&E departments (Emergency Departments and Nurse/GP led minor injury units) in the recent past, along with historical activity for comparison purposes. The recent trend data is shown by age group, sex and broad deprivation category (SIMD). Information is also available at different levels of geographical breakdown such as Health Boards, Health and Social Care partnerships, and Scotland totals.

This data is also available on the COVID-19 Wider Impact Dashboard. Additional data sources relating to this topic area are provided in the Links section of the Metadata below. Information on COVID-19, including stay at home advice for people who are self-isolating and their households, can be found on NHS Inform.

All publications and supporting material to this topic area can be found in the weekly COVID-19 Statistical Report. The date of the next release can be found on our list of forthcoming publications.