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Ambulatory or primary care sensitive conditions (ACSCs) are those conditions for which hospital admission could be prevented by interventions in primary care. At present, different definitions of ACSCs are used for research and health policy analysis. This study aimed to explore the impact of different definitions of ACSCs and associated disease codes on analysis of health service activity.

Retrospective cross-sectional study using Hospital Episode Statistics (HES).

All ACSCs identified by a literature search were documented. Conditions and codes were standardized using International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 10. A subset of ACSCs commonly used in England was compared with all 36 ACSCs identified by the search in a retrospective cross-sectional study using HES.

In total, 36 potential ACSCs were identified, which contained numerous subcategories …