Hospital admissions for drug overdose (FOI)

Request

A

How many people have been admitted to hospital for drug overdoses in the past ten years.

B

Could you break this down by year, what happened to the patient, which drug was used and how much.

Response

A

The Health and Social Services Department (HSSD) note that any drug / medicament (legal or illegal, prescribed or otherwise) taken in combination with alcohol is considered to be a poisoning, so will be coded in this way. Due to the way combined overdoses are coded, episodes may be coded as both intentional and unintentional - where this has occurred it is indicated on the table.

*Data is only available from July 2011 when the current hospital patient administration system was implemented.

Numbers less than five have been shown as less than five (<5). Disclosure control has been applied to the data further to Article 25 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 in order to protect the identity of individuals.

B

It is not possible for the recorded information to provide a response to this question. Whilst HSSD index cases with appropriate codes for the substance that has been taken, these are grouped into categories and therefore individual case files would have to be examined in order to determine the exact substance used in each incident and the subsequent outcome. Such review would take in excess of the 12.5 hours allowed under the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011.

Articles applied

Article 25 Personal Information

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005.

(2) Information is absolutely exempt information if –

(a) it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005; and

(b) its supply to a member of the public would contravene any of the data protection principles, as defined in that Law.

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.