Written question asked by Justine Greening (Conservative) on Thursday, 25 March 2010, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Monday, 29 March 2010. It was answered by Phil Hope (Labour) on Tuesday, 6 April 2010 on behalf of the Department of Health.

Prosthetics: Health Services

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Health what statistics his Department collects on (a) demographic, (b) diagnosis and (c) treatment information held at prosthetics service centres in England; and whether there are plans to replace the National Amputee Statistical Database.

Answer: Between 1997 and 2007 the National Amputee Statistical Database collected data from a number of providers using its minimum dataset which contained fields such as:"Patient Number;""Date of Birth;""Commissioning Code;""Centre Code;""Gender;""Category of patient;""Ethnic Origin;""Date of Referral following Amputation;""Date of Amputation;""Level of Amputation; and""Cause of Amputation (Aetiology)."There are no plans at present to replace the database.Health Episodes Statistics which collates data on the care provided by national health service hospitals and for NHS hospital patients treated elsewhere does not include any data on application of prosthesis as this rarely occurs in a hospital setting.Health Episodes Statistics does measure in-patient amputations using the OPCS classification of Interventions and Procedures. When combined with other data from the Admitted Patient Care Commissioning Data Set (age, sex, postcode, ethnicity, diagnosis), Health Episodes Statistics can be used to retrieve a great deal of the amputation data previously provided by National Amputee Statistical Database.Comprehensive central data is not collected about the numbers of people with prostheses or the number of prostheses that are supplied.

Secondary information