Statistics on Alcohol, England 2021

This section presents information on the number of hospital admissions for diseases, injuries and conditions that can be attributed to alcohol consumption. The data in this section come from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities Local Alcohol Profiles for England, which use data from NHS Digital’s Hospital Episode Statistics.

Estimates of the number of alcohol-related hospital admissions have been calculated by applying alcohol-attributable fractions (AAFs) to Hospital Episode Statistics data. An AAF is the proportion of a condition assessed to have been caused by alcohol.  See appendix B for more details.

Two measures for alcohol-related hospital admissions have been used:

• Narrow measure – where the main reason for admission to hospital was attributable to alcohol. 
• Broad measure – where the primary reason for hospital admission or a secondary diagnosis was linked to alcohol.

The narrow measure estimates the number of hospital admissions which are primarily due to alcohol consumption and provides the best indication of trends in alcohol-related hospital admissions. These are admissions where an alcohol-related disease, injury or condition was the primary reason for a hospital admission or an alcohol-related external cause was recorded in a secondary diagnosis field.

The broad measure gives an indication of the full impact of alcohol on hospital admissions and the burden placed on the NHS.

Note: these indicators use a new set of AAFs, and so differ from previously published data. Time series comparisons are based on the new AAFs but data is only available from 2016/17.

Admissions by year

In 2019/20 there were 280 thousand estimated admissions where the main reason for admission to hospital was attributable to alcohol (narrow measure).

This is 2% higher than 2018/19 and 8% higher than 2016/17.

This represents 1.6% of all hospital admissions which is unchanged since 2016/17.

There were almost 980 thousand estimated admissions where the primary reason for hospital admission or a secondary diagnosis was linked to alcohol, which is 4% higher than 2018/19 (broad measure). Changes over a longer time period will partly reflect improvements in recording of secondary diagnoses.

This represents 5.7% of all hospital admissions. 

Admissions by age

24% of patients were aged between 65 and 74.