A quick look at Dec 2019 A&E data

Posted : Blog Post : 19.01.2020 - North West Open Data

My father in law spent some time at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester this month, he was admitted via A&E. Visiting him there made it clear that the A&E was at or beyond it’s capacity. A tweet from last year by @owenboswarva caught my attention in a thread in mid January.

I downloaded the data and imported it into Google Sheets, the fact that it was under pressure didn’t surprise me, I’d seen a couple of articles on Cheshire Live, eg the introduction of portable wards. All A&Es are under pressure in the winter but I wanted to put that into some kind of context for the region. I produced the following charts after a few hours work

Whilst the Attendance and Admission charts show relative low levels of attendance compared to similar sized hospitals, the Countess appears 6th and 5th respectively in the in failure to meet 2 of the key 4hr targets.

In brief in December they had 6556 attendances, resulting in 3669 admissions(not all of these will be through A&E). That’s an average of 211 per day, 9 every hour or 1 person through their doors every 6 or 7 minutes.

A 'new look' A&E is promised for this spring, it will be interesting to look at the data again next January and see what improvements have been made.

You can view the data row for The Countess, with column descriptions and data definitions here

You can view the spreadsheet here.