Question reference: S3W-30858
- Asked by: Tricia Marwick, MSP for Central Fife, Scottish National Party
- Date lodged: 19 January 2010
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Current status: Answered by Shona Robison on 1 February 2010
Question
To ask the Scottish Executive how many patients were treated for alcohol-related injuries or illnesses by NHS Fife in 2009.
Answer
Information on the calendar year 2009 is not currently available. The most up to date information available is for financial the year 2007-08. Data on the financial year 2008-09 will be available from 23 February 2010.
The question has two separate parts:
1. Patients treated for Alcohol related illnesses.
2. Patients treated for alcohol related injuries.
1. Patients with alcohol related illnesses are treated in a variety of inpatient and outpatient settings. The information available centrally covers only alcohol related hospital admissions. Information on the number of patients discharged from Fife hospitals with an alcohol related diagnosis in 2007-08 is presented in table 1. These figures include only those admissions due to illnesses directly attributable to alcohol (such as alcoholic liver disease) and do not include the much larger number of admissions resulting from illnesses indirectly attributable to alcohol (such as unintentional injuries, cancers and high blood pressure).
Table 1: General acute inpatient discharges, patients discharged with an alcohol-related diagnosis, in any position, from hospitals in Fife Health Board of treatment:
2007-08:
| Financial Year | Fife |
| 2007-08 | 1,562 |
Source: Information Services Division Scotland (ISD).
2. Patients with alcohol related injuries are treated in a variety of inpatient and outpatient settings such as accident and emergency departments. Information is not available centrally on the number of alcohol related injuries treated in outpatient and accident and emergency settings. Furthermore, it is not possible from centrally held information to establish that an individual injury was caused by alcohol.
ISD recently carried out work to estimate the number of hospital admissions due to alcohol related injuries using alcohol attributable fractions. The results are presented here:
http://www.scotpho.org.uk/nmsruntime/saveasdialog.asp?lID=5318&sID=4562.
The report presents figures at Scotland level only and information is not available separately at NHS board level.