Asthma: secondary care data
Data on asthma hospital admissions are held in the Scottish Morbidity Records SMR01 database, and are published by Public Health Scotland in the data tables of the acute hospital activity publication. Data are available by financial year, NHS board, and council area. Note that while data on outpatient consultations are held in the SMR00 database, information on diagnoses is not included and asthma patients cannot be identified from the specialty of the outpatient service attended.
Information on hospital admissions is also included in the ScotPHO profiles tool, where indicators for patients hospitalised with asthma and children admitted to hospital due to asthma are available for health board, council area, HSC partnership, HSC locality, and intermediate zone. Inequalities in asthma patient hospitalisations can also be explored through this tool.
Chart 1 shows the number of patients admitted to hospital with asthma between 2002/03 and 2021/22. Individual patients were only counted once per year. Overall asthma admission rates remained relatively stable between 2010/11 and 2019/20. A significant drop in the rate occurred in 2020/21 during the COVID-19 pandemic; changes to service provision, reluctance to seek treatment, reduced air pollution, and lower transmission of respiratory viruses during the pandemic period are all potential explanations for the observed reduction. Although rates increased slightly in 2021/22, they remain below the rates observed before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chart 2 shows the asthma rates by age and sex over the same period. Admission rates for children under the age of ten show large long-term reductions. Admission rates for boys under 10 fell from a peak of 378 per 100,000 in 2006/07 to 162 in 2019/20, and for girls under 10 from 214 to 94 during the same period. Following the drop observed in 2020/21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, admission rates have returned to those observed in 2019/20 for children under 10, whilst they remain lower for those aged 10 and over.
Please note: If you require the most up-to-date data available, please check the data sources directly as new data may have been published since these data pages were last updated. Although we endeavour to ensure that the data pages are kept up-to-date, there may be a time lag between new data being published and the relevant ScotPHO web pages being updated.
