Hospital admissions indicators added to the co-occurring substance misuse and mental health issues profile
Published 2 September 2025
Applies to England
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/substance-misuse-and-mental-health-issues-september-2025-update/hospital-admissions-indicators-added-to-the-co-occurring-substance-misuse-and-mental-health-issues-profile
This September 2025 update of the Co-occurring substance misuse and mental health issues profile includes 3 new indicators being added to the profile.
These indicators are:
- admissions for drug-related mental and behavioural disorders
- admissions for poisoning by drug misuse
- admissions where drug misuse-related mental and behavioural disorders were a factor
Previous reporting
The indicators were previously published in NHS Digital’s Statistics on drug misuse series, until the 2020 report, published in January 2021. After NHS Digital became part of NHS England in February 2023, NHS England published the data as part of their broader Statistics on public health series.
The indicators are now being incorporated into the Fingertips tool. Fingertips is a large public health data collection, where data is organised into themed profiles. Including the indicators here will make sure the data is available and will help local areas to monitor drug-related harms using official hospital data.
The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, in the Department of Health and Social Care, has worked closely with NHS England to replicate their methodology, to make sure there is continuity and comparability with the earlier series.
More about the indicators
The 3 indicators present information on the number of hospital admissions (for inpatient settings only) related to drug misuse.
‘Admissions for drug-related mental and behavioural disorders’ are hospital admissions where the main reason (primary diagnosis) was drug-related mental and behavioural disorders.
‘Admissions for poisoning by drug misuse’ are hospital admissions where the main reason (primary diagnosis) was poisoning by drugs. These are drugs that are controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and includes both intentional and unintentional poisoning.
‘Admissions where drug-related mental and behavioural disorders were a factor’ is a broader indicator of drug-related hospital admissions. It includes both primary and secondary diagnoses. A secondary diagnosis does not necessarily mean that a drug-related mental and behavioural disorder was a contributing factor for the admission, but it may have been relevant to a patient’s episode of care.
What the data includes
The indicators include numbers of admissions and directly age-standardised rates per 100,000 population. The age-standardised rates have been included to enable comparison across local areas and over time.
Each indicator is presented by age group and sex at national level and lower level geographies, which are:
- upper tier local authority
- region
- combined authority
- NHS integrated care board
- Index of Multiple Deprivation deciles - this is a way of ranking areas in England by their level of deprivation into 10 equal groups, where decile 1 represents the most deprived 10% of areas and decile 10 represents the least deprived 10%