NHS England Data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
NHS England publishes its A&E attendance and admissions statistics, alongside other data, on its website, here<\/a>. On the second Thursday of each month, the previous month's performance statistics are published. These data report adherence to the 4 hour A&E target at the system and provider levels and break down admissions by department types. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, each NHS release is just a cross-section; each month's data is released on its own, making comparisons over time difficult. To build a panel of NHS trusts' A&E performance, we must download and merge 13 years of separate monthly releases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The data is indexed with a separate page for each fiscal year. For example, 'A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2022-23<\/a>' hosts individual monthly A&E data releases for April 2022-March 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first step in collecting and merging the data we need is to identify the URLs of the index pages where the monthly releases are hosted. In an ideal world, these URLs would be standardised but this is not the case. Instead we can collect the links by scraping them from the sidebar where they are listed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We can extract the sidebar links we need by downloading the HTML source of the A&E stats homepage and then extracting all the links to the yearly index pages (e.g. \"A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2023-24<\/a>\"). In the code snippet below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n1. Finding A&E Stats Index Pages<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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