Diabetes: secondary care data

Statistics on hospital discharges for diabetes are held in the Scottish Morbidity Record (SMR01) database. However, diabetes is often not recognised or recorded as the underlying reason for complications that lead to hospital admission. Leslie et al showed that discharge statistics underestimate the importance of diabetes as a cause of hospital admission. Table 1 shows hospital discharges with diabetes for the calendar year 2006 for Scotland as a whole.

Table 1: Number of hospital discharges for diabetes (1) and number of people with at least one discharge for diabetes (1), Scotland, calendar year 2006

	Female	Male	All
No of hospital discharges with:
. . diabetes as principal diagnosis	2,851	3,344	6,195
diabetes mentioned in any diagnostic position	34,774	38,859	73,633
No of people with at least one discharge with:
. . diabetes as principal diagnosis	1,696	2,088	3,784
diabetes mentioned in any diagnostic position	16,867	18,142	35,009

(1) Using diagnostic codes ICD10 E10-E14.
Source: SMR01 (ISD Scotland).