§ Mr. Heddleasked the Secretary of State for Social Services, pursuant to his reply to the hon. Member for Lichfield and Tamworth on 14 April, Official Report, Volume 88, column 95, indicating that 18,110 total hip replacements were carried out in National Health Service hospitals in England and Wales in 1978, what are the reasons why figures for 1979 and 1980 are not yet available; and why information on the ages of patients is not readily available from central statistics.
§ Dr. VaughanThe source of the information on total hip replacement given in my reply to my hon. Friend on 14 April—[Vol. 3, c.95–6]—is the hospital in-patient inquiry. This inquiry is based on a 10 per cent. sample of in-patient records which are processed by regional health authorities before submission to the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys for validation, processing and summarisation. The nature of the records being analysed 297W and the various stages which must be gone through mean that there is an inevitable time lag between the end of any one calendar year and the date by which final figures for that year are available.
Tabulations routinely produced from the hospital in-patient inquiry are necessarily limited. These tabulations contain information on the ages of patients undergoing surgery for all forms of arthroplasty but not for the individual operation of hip replacement. Such information could be obtained only by producing a special tabulation at considerable cost.