Impact of cold daily number of emergency department attendances

Last updated on Thursday, 11 December 2025 at 02:55pm

Summary

• Topic: impact-of-cold
• Category: syndromic
• API name: impact-of-cold_syndromic_emergencyDepartment_countsByDay

Rationale

Monitoring trends in daily emergency department attendances can provide an early warning of human public health threats and provide detail to inform public health action.

Definition

The metric shows the daily number of attendances at emergency departments by females diagnosed with presentations associated with cold weather in emergency departments across England. The diagnoses included are: fracture of the femur, wrist or forearm plus cold specific diagnoses of hypothermia, or cold injuries.

Methodology

Impact of cold emergency department attendances are identified from the primary diagnosis of each female attendance. Other diagnoses may be recorded but are not used to group syndromic surveillance health indicators. The diagnoses are based on signs or symptoms of an illness and may not have lab confirmation. The gender is based on the ‘person stated gender’ recorded for each attendance.

We receive an automated daily transfer of anonymised emergency department data from NHS England from the Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS). Not all emergency departments provide data daily, so data reported are restricted to include emergency department attendances where:

• data relate to attendances at a type 01 emergency department (major emergency departments with full resuscitation facilities)
• we received data on patients arriving at that emergency department on all 7 of the most recent 7 days reported on
• we received data for the most recent 7 days reported on within 2 calendar days of patient arrival

When an emergency department meets these criteria, we include all historical data. Which emergency departments are included each week are likely to change. This change in emergency departments included week-to-week means that data published in different weeks cannot be combined to make a longer time series.

Caveats

The data presented are based on a national syndromic surveillance system. They should be used to monitor trends, not estimate numbers of 'cases' of a disease or condition.

The syndromic surveillance indicators group together diagnoses made based on signs or symptoms of an illness, there may not be lab confirmation of a diagnosis.

We do not identify individual emergency departments included in the syndromic surveillance data published each week.