Acute hospital activity and NHS beds information (annual)
Year ending 31 March 2024

About this release

This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) provides an update on a range of statistics on various aspects of hospital care, sourced from hospital administration systems across Scotland. These include information on outpatient, inpatient and day case activity trends, numbers of medical diagnoses, operations, emergency admissions and beds statistics. Data presented for 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024 are provisional and subject to change in future publications as submissions may be updated to reflect a more accurate and complete set of data from NHS Boards. This release includes the NHS Fife, NHS Golden Jubilee (GJ), and NHS Highland National Treatment Centre (NTC) locations.

Main points

Hospital admissions

This is an image which shows admissions into Scottish hospitals for the financial year 2023/24, excluding admissions to maternity wards and mental health hospitals. one in eight Scottish residents were admitted to hospital in 2023/24. Of these, 69% had one hospital admission, 18% had two admissions and 13% had three or more admissions. Of the 1.1 million hospital admissions in 2023/24, 51% were emergency inpatient admissions, 10% were elective inpatient admissions and 39% were day case admissions.

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Number of people admitted to Scottish hospitals, 2023/24 (provisional)

• Around 0.7 million Scottish residents (one in eight of the population) were admitted to hospital in 2023/24. Of these, three out of ten patients (31%) had more than one admission. There were just over 1.1 million admissions into hospital in 2023/24 – a 4% increase compared to last year (2022/23) and a 6% decrease compared to five years ago (2018/19).
• The average length of stay has been decreasing. In 2023/24, the average length of stay for inpatients was 6.7 days compared to 7.1 days last year (2022/23). Patients admitted as emergencies generally stay longer than elective hospital admissions. In 2023/24, the average length of stay was 3.4 days for elective inpatients and 7.3 days for emergency inpatients.
• In 2023/24, there were just over 1 million main procedures performed – a 3% increase on last year (2022/23) and a 11% decrease compared to four years ago (2019/20). NHS GJ and NHS Highland NTCs performed 11,704 and 2,689 Ophthalmology procedures respectively in 2023/24. NHS Fife and NHS Highland NTCs performed 2,089 and 1,734 Trauma & Orthopaedic procedures respectively in 2023/24.

Beds

• Bed numbers and percentage occupancy have generally been increasing in recent years. In 2023/24, the average number of available staffed beds for acute specialties was 13,755 – a 0.4% increase on last year (2022/23) and a 5.2% increase compared to five years ago (2018/19). Of these, 9,861 (71.7%) were for medical specialties and 3,894 (28.3%) were for surgical specialties. The percentage occupancy for acute specialties fell from 88.1% in 2022/23 to 87.5% in 2023/24.

Outpatients

• Nearly 1 million Scottish residents (one in six of the population) visited an outpatient department in 2023/24 as a new outpatient. During the same period, 7.4% (104,176) of new outpatient appointments were not kept without prior notification (‘Did Not Attends’). There were just over 4 million total outpatient attendances (around 1.3 million new and 2.7 million returns) in 2023/24 – a 2% increase on last year (2022/23) and a 6% decrease compared to five years ago (2018/19).

Data quality

There are known issues with the quality of data presented, such as the inpatient and day case completeness. For more information, please see the data issues and completeness document that accompanies this publication.

Background

The volume of hospital activity and trends observed continue to be impacted post-pandemic and during the recovery phase. For example, inpatient and day case activity and outpatient activity have both reduced by 6%, when comparing financial year 2018/19 (pre-pandemic) to 2023/24. However, activity levels have generally been recovering from July 2020 onwards, but are still not up to pre-pandemic levels.

Definitions of outpatients, admissions and available staffed beds are available within the Glossary section of the full report. Further details are also available in the PHS Data Dictionary.

Further information

Disclosure control methods have been applied to the data in order to protect patient confidentiality: therefore, some figures on total counts may not be additive.

Data from this publication are also available on the Scottish Health and Social Care Open platform (external website).

The next release of this publication will be in September 2025.