Episode based activity

A consultant episode is the time a patient spends in the continuous care of one consultant. The episode can be finished because of discharge, death or transfer, either to another consultant or another hospital. As a result, a patient may have more than one finished consultant episode (FCE) during an admission to hospital (if transferred to the care of another consultant).

Activity data

Episode based acute hospital inpatient and day case activity data is obtained from the hospital inpatient system (HIS), which is a patient level administrative data source. Information is now freely available from 2005/06 for episode based activity within the acute programme of care.