This is the indirectly standarised rate of emergency admissions for children aged under 16 with lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI) per 100,000 population. Respiratory infections form one of the most common reasons for hospital admission in childhood, especially in infants. Between 1% and 3% of all babies experience an admission with bronchiolitis and about 2.5% of all child admissions are for pneumonia.

Emergency admission rates in children, especially those under 5 years old for lower respiratory infections (bronchiolitis, bronchopneumonia and pneumonia) reflect a variety of influences. Rates vary across the country but are increased in areas of socio-economic deprivation. They also vary between health economies even when social deprivation is taken into account, and then probably reflect variation in access to, and expectation of, health services, and also clinical practice. There are linkages between higher breast feeding and reduction of exposure to tobacco smoke and preventive measures which reduce both incidence and severity of infections.

Much childhood morbidity and a significant proportion of childhood mortality results from these lower respiratory infections. This indicator will enable trends for improvement to be monitored which should result from a variety of current policy interventions in health promotion, health care and parental support.

NOTE

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic began to have an impact on Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data late in the 2019/20 financial year, which continued into the 2020/21 financial year. This means we are seeing different patterns in the submitted data, for example, fewer patients being admitted to hospital, and therefore statistics which contain data from this period should be interpreted with care.