Freedom of Information Request 0565 2019/20
I write to you on behalf of the Violence Research Group of Cardiff University. We are conducting an annual national study of attendances to Emergency Departments for assault-related injury and would be grateful if your department could provide us with attendance data for 2019. This data will be used, as in previous years, to analyse trends in violence in England and Wales from injury perspective.
The data we require are as follows (for period 1st January 2019 and 31st December 2019) in an electronic format that allows us to read the data into a database. Many hospitals respond to our survey and provide data in the form we require. Preferably this format is in an excel file or comma separated text file.
We require the gender of the patient (M or F), the date that they attended due to assault (dd/mm/yyyy) and their age. Age can either be numerical to the nearest year (preferred) or in age bands (“0-10”, “11-17”, “18-30”, “31-50”, “51+”), we can also accept date of birth.
To calculate the level of assault-related injury in England and Wales we also require the total number of attendances for any reason in the year of interest, i.e. 2019.
Please also include the names of hospitals providing assault data.
The Data Protection Act places restrictions on what data can be shared. It is the view of nearly 160 hospitals in England and Wales that the data we are requesting (age, date of attendance and gender) do not constitute personal information and that it is not realistic to expect that information to be used to discover an individual’s identity. If you would like to contact someone to talk about these issues you can do so by responding to this email.
