Acute hospital activity and NHS beds information (quarterly)
Quarter ending 30 September 2020

A National Statistics publication for Scotland

Published: 23 February 2021
Type: Statistical report
Author: Public Health Scotland

Hospital care

Data summary

This release does not include specific COVID-19 information. For PHS Coronavirus information, visit our COVID-19 webpages. Coronavirus in Scotland information, can also be found on the Scottish Government website.

You can view previous publications prior to September 2019 on the archive Public Health Scotland website (external website).

Main points

Please note this release includes Scotland going into emergency measures due to COVID-19, which is impacting on the volume of hospital activity and trends observed. For example, the inpatient and daycase, and outpatient activity has decreased by nearly a third when comparing July to September 2020 to the same quarter last year.

Outpatients

Image of a line chart showing a time trend for Outpatient Attendances for quarters ending September 2015 to September 2020 is shown. There is an increase in outpatient attendances in NHSScotland in the most recent quarter compared to last quarter, but a sharp decrease compared to September 2019. — Image caption Outpatient attendances in NHSScotland, for quarters ending September 2015 to September 2020^p

^p - Provisional. Data presented for the latest quarter 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.

There were under one million (746,470) outpatient attendances between 1 July to 30 September 2020. Of these, 27% (199,978 attendances) were new cases. The remaining 73% (546,492 attendances) were patients returning for follow up appointments.

Inpatients and daycases

There were 199,108 hospital admissions between 1 July to 30 September 2020. Of these, 57% (112,826) were emergency admissions; 9% (18,798) elective admissions; and 33% (66,495) daycases.

Beds

There were on average 12,615 available staffed beds per day for all acute specialties in the quarter ending 30 September 2020. An available staffed bed is one that is available for inpatient or daycase care. For all acute specialties in the quarter ending 30 September 2020, the percentage occupancy was 77%.

Data quality

There are known issues with the quality of data presented such as inpatient and outpatient completeness. For more information, please see the Data Quality and Data Trends sections.

Further information

The data for the most recent quarter is provisional. Provisional data is subject to change in future publications as submissions may be updated to reflect a more accurate and complete set of data from NHS Boards.

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.

Further information on this publication is available on these web pages. Data from this publication is available to download from our Data files and Data explorer sections of our website and the Scottish Health and Social Care Open Data platform (external website). Supplementary monthly outpatient data is accessible in the COVID Wider Impacts Dashboard (external website).

Previously published information prior to September 2019 are listed on the Hospital Care Publication page (external website). Background information on hospital care can be found in the Hospital Care Topic web page of the PHS website.

Publication summary

View the publication summary (PDF, 136KB)