Alignment of other hospital tooth extraction sources
Updated 8 February 2024
Applies to England
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NHS Outcomes Framework
The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) and NHS Digital, through the NHS Outcomes Framework, both publish data on the extraction of teeth for children (resulting from tooth decay, as well other reasons) in an acute setting. While both sets of statistics are based on the Hospital Episode Statistics data produced by NHS Digital, they had previously been summarised in different ways that meant figures were not directly comparable.
To provide greater consistency and coherence, the respective organisations agreed to use common age groupings across the 2 releases and agree a common set of procedure and diagnosis codes in their definitions for future publications. These new age groups were used for the first time in the 2017 to 2018 data. The OHID tooth extractions dataset includes children aged 0 to 19 years old while the NHS Digital dataset includes children aged 0 to 10 years old. Both organisations now use the same diagnostic coding criteria for defining tooth decay.
In March 2023, NHS England (NHSE) carried out a consultation on the future of the NHS Outcomes Framework. As a result of this, only a limited number of indicators will still be published by NHSE on an annual basis. For most of the existing indicators (including tooth extractions), users will be directed to source data via web links. As there is no longer a requirement to align to the NHS Outcomes Framework, the decision has been taken to revert the age band groupings to the traditional quinary age bands of 0 to 4, 5 to 9, 10 to 14 and 15 to 19 years. These age bands align with other hospital analyses published by NHS Digital.
NHS Digital
NHS Digital publishes a report on admitted patient care activity in English NHS hospitals and English NHS-commissioned activity in the independent sector. The data is extracted from the Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES) data warehouse and includes activity on tooth extraction procedures broken down by age band. This makes it directly comparable with the figures published by OHID.
OHID Fingertips data tool
Fingertips is a large public health data collection tool. Data is organised into themed profiles. Within the child and maternal health profile there is an oral health section. This contains an indicator for hospital admission rates for dental caries for children aged 0 to 5 years over a rolling 3-year period. This indicator is based on the same HES selection and coding criteria as the OHID dental public health analysis, but is not directly comparable because of the different age criteria and different hospital admission year ranges.
NHS national cost collection
Another official source that includes data on volumes of tooth extractions for children is the NHS national cost collection data produced by NHS England. This is also based on the Hospital Episode Statistics. However, it should be noted that because of the purpose of collating the data, this publication does not differentiate between decay and other reasons for extractions, and the procedure categorisations may not be consistent with those used in the OHID and NHS Outcomes Framework statistics.