Acute hospital activity and NHS beds information (annual)
Year ending 31 March 2025

About this release

This annual release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) provides an update on a range of statistics on various aspects of acute 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 2024 to 31 March 2025 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.

Please note there has been a change to the source of the data to derive statistics on outpatients. The returns outpatient data source has changed from ISD(S)1 Outpatients to SMR00 Outpatients. As a result, figures from this annual publication onwards will not be directly comparable to previous publications. Please refer to the data issues and completeness document for further information.

Main points

Hospital admissions

This is an image which shows admissions into Scottish hospitals for the financial year 2024/25, excluding admissions to maternity wards and mental health hospitals. One in eight Scottish residents were admitted to hospital in 2024/25. Of these, 69% had one hospital admission, 18% had two admissions and 13% had three or more admissions. Of the 1.2 million hospital admissions in 2024/25, 48% were emergency inpatient admissions, 11% were elective inpatient admissions and 40% were day case admissions.

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Number of people admitted to Scottish hospitals, 2024/25 (provisional)

• Around 0.7 million Scottish residents (one in eight of the population) were admitted to hospital in 2024/25. Of these, three out of ten patients (31%) had more than one admission.
• There were just under 1.2 million admissions into hospital in 2024/25 – a 1% decrease compared to the previous year (2023/24) and a 7% decrease compared to five years ago (2019/20). Of these, 48% were emergency inpatient admissions, 11% elective (planned) inpatient admissions, and 40% day cases.
• In 2024/25, the average length of stay for inpatients was 6.8 days compared to 6.7 days in the previous year (2023/24). Patients admitted as emergency inpatients generally stay longer than elective inpatient admissions. In 2024/25, the average length of stay was 3.1 days for elective inpatients and 7.4 days for emergency inpatients.
• In 2024/25, there were just over 1 million main procedures performed – a 1% decrease on the previous year (2023/24) and a 46% increase compared to four years ago (2020/21). NHS Golden Jubilee (GJ), and NHS Highland National Treatment Centres (NTCs) performed 11,650 and 6,622 Ophthalmology procedures respectively in 2024/25. NHS Fife, NHS Forth Valley and NHS Highland NTCs performed 2,547, 155 and 2,085 Trauma & Orthopaedic procedures respectively in 2024/25.

Beds

• In 2024/25, the average number of available staffed beds per day for acute specialties was 13,717 – a 0.3% decrease on the previous year (2023/24) and a 3.7% increase compared to five years ago (2019/20). An available staffed bed is a bed which is resourced for inpatient or day case care. Of these, 9,824 (71.6%) were for medical specialties and 3,893 (28.4%) were for surgical specialties.
• The percentage occupancy for acute specialties increased from 87.5% in 2023/24 to 88.6% in 2024/25. The percentage occupancy is the percentage of available staffed beds that were occupied on average by inpatients during the period.

Outpatients

• Nearly 1 million Scottish residents (one in six of the population) visited an outpatient department in 2024/25 as a new outpatient. Of these, nearly a quarter of patients had more than one new outpatient attendance.
• There were just over 4 million total outpatient attendances (around 1.3 million new and 2.8 million returns) in 2024/25 – a 0.2% decrease on the previous year (2023/24) and a 5.3% decrease compared to five years ago (2019/20).
• During the same period, 8.2% (363,545) of all outpatient appointments were not kept without prior notification by the patient (‘Did Not Attends’).

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 acute hospital care 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 reduced by 5% and 7% respectively, when comparing financial year 2018/19 (pre-pandemic) to 2024/25. 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). Quarterly data are available from the quarterly publication page on our website. Background information on acute hospital care can be found in the Hospital Care topic area.

The next release of this publication will be in September 2026.