To ask the Scottish Executive how many people aged 65 and over were admitted to hospital as a result of malnutrition in (a) 2007-08 and (b) 2008-09, broken down by NHS board.
Centrally held data can provide some information for patients where malnutrition is identified on their hospital records. However, malnutrition will often not be the principal reason for admission to hospital but will be a co-morbidity or consequence of a more serious condition. Malnutrition may be recorded on a hospital record if it is clinically identified as an active problem requiring significant investigation while the patient is in hospital; or if it is present when the patient is admitted and requires routine management. As there is no standard group of diagnosis codes to identify malnutrition, the definition of malnutrition employed in this analysis includes diagnoses of anorexia nervosa, nutritional deficiencies (e.g. vitamin A, thiamine and calcium deficiencies), nutritional anaemias and malnutrition related diabetes mellitus.
The answer is given in the following table:
Table 1: Number of patients aged 65 years and over, treated in acute hospitals in Scotland, who have a recorded diagnosis of malnutrition; by NHS Board of Residence; financial years 2007-08 and 2008-09.
| NHS Board of Residence | 2007-08 | 2008-09 |
| NHS Ayrshire and Arran | 61 | 65 |
| NHS Borders | 30 | 38 |
| NHS Dumfries and Galloway | 85 | 61 |
| NHS Fife | 85 | 67 |
| NHS Forth Valley | 16 | 32 |
| NHS Grampian | 73 | 68 |
| NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde | 215 | 166 |
| NHS Highland | 48 | 67 |
| NHS Lanarkshire | 66 | 70 |
| NHS Lothian | 292 | 305 |
| NHS Tayside | 47 | 50 |
| NHS Island Boards | 9 | 16 |
| All Scotland | 1,027 | 1,005 |
Source Information Services Division (ISD), Scottish morbidity record 01 (SMR 01).
These statistics are derived from the ISD linked database containing linked discharge records from non-obstetric and non-psychiatric hospitals in Scotland (SMR01). The figures shown should be treated with caution because they show the instances where malnutrition is recorded on a patient''s record regardless of the main reason for admission to hospital. Improvements in the completeness of coding (the number of diagnoses that are recorded) over the time period reported may artificially increase the number of recorded cases of malnutrition on hospital records year on year. For both 2007-08 and 2008-09, over 80% of the patients have nutritional deficiency, nutritional anaemia or anorexia nervosa diagnosis codes recorded rather than the more severe malnutrition codes.
Note that the figures in these tables may not correspond exactly with figures released previously. This is because databases are continually updated and corrected. Data for 2009-10 is not complete at this time and is, as yet, unpublished. Data for 2009-10 will be available from 28 September 2010.