Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS)#

Last modified: 23 Oct 2025

People who received care in Accident and Emergency (A&E) settings in NHS hospitals in England.

1. Summary#

This dataset replaced the HES Accident and Emergency (HESAE) dataset in 2020. Data collected include demographics, dates of attendance, admission and discharge, presenting complaints, outcomes of attendance, waiting times, clinical investigations, diagnosis and treatment.

Dataset Descriptor Dataset-specific Information
Name of Dataset in TRE NHSE_ECDS
Citation (APA) Data Services, NHS England (NHSE). (2024). NHS England: Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS). UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC). https://doi.org/10.71760/ukllc-dataset-00359-03
Download Citation Citeproc JSON     BibTeX     RIS
Series NHS England
Owner NHS England
Copyright Copyright © (2025), NHS England. Data re-used with the permission of NHS England. All rights reserved.
Temporal Coverage in the TRE 10/2017 - ongoing
Geographical Coverage England
Participant Count 121989
Number of Variables 220
Number of Observations 353157
Key Link https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/data-collections-and-data-sets/data-sets/emergency-care-data-set-ecds
Keywords A&E patients, NHS hospitals
Latest Extract Date 2024-04-26
Specific Restrictions to Data Use None
Build a Data Request https://explore.ukllc.ac.uk/

2. Metrics#

Click on the plus sign to see the number of participants represented in each dataset.

Table 2: Participants from each LPS represented in the ECDS dataset in the UK LLC TRE. Note: Individual cohort counts of less than 10 are suppressed to <10 and excluded from total participant counts for datasets.

3. Version History#

Version 1 2 3
Version Date 21 Dec 2022 13 Apr 2023 26 Apr 2024
Number of Variables 221 221 220
Number of Observations 189675 218869 353157
DOI 10.71760/ukllc-dataset-00359-01 10.71760/ukllc-dataset-00359-02 10.71760/ukllc-dataset-00359-03
Change Log 10.71760/ukllc-dataset-00359-01/activities 10.71760/ukllc-dataset-00359-02/activities 10.71760/ukllc-dataset-00359-03/activities

4. Documentation#

We are currently building a documentation storage system which will host useful documents related to datasets and data owners. We will surface these documents on Guidebook.

5. Useful Syntax#

Below we will include syntax that may be helpful to other researchers in the UK LLC TRE. For longer scripts, we will include a snippet of the code plus a link to the UK LLC GitHub repository where you can find the full scripts.