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 2022/23, split by sex. It illustrates that despite females consistently being more likely than males to have asthma-related hospital admission, the gap in admission rates by sex widened in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant drop in the rate then occurred in 2020/21; 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 have since increased for both sexes, they remain below pre-pandemic rates.
Chart 2 shows the asthma rates by age and sex over the same period. It demonstrates that although asthma-related hospital admissions in children under 10 have reduced in the last 20 years, young children are still more likely to be hospitalised than those aged 10 and above; a rate of which is considerably higher in young male children. Conversely, when comparing asthma-related hospital admissions in those aged 10 and above, females are more likely to be hospitalised than males.
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.
