Acute hospital activity and NHS beds information (quarterly)
Quarter ending 31 December 2020
A National Statistics publication for Scotland
- Published
- 25 May 2021
- Type
- Statistical report
- Author
- Public Health Scotland
Data summary
This release does not include specific COVID-19 information. For PHS Coronavirus information, visit our COVID-19 webpages. Coronavirus in Scotland information (external website) 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 day case, and outpatient activity has decreased by just over a fifth when comparing October to December 2020 to the same quarter last year.
Outpatients
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 (855,126) outpatient attendances between 1 October to 31 December 2020. Of these, 29% (250,808 attendances) were new cases. The remaining 71% (604,318 attendances) were patients returning for follow up appointments.
Inpatients and daycases
There were 216,368 hospital admissions between 1 October to 31 December 2020. Of these, 52% (111,889) were emergency admissions; 10% (22,222) elective admissions; and 37% (80,955) day cases.
Beds
There were on average 12,980 available staffed beds per day for all acute specialties in the quarter ending 31 December 2020. An available staffed bed is one that is available for inpatient or day case care. For all acute specialties in the quarter ending 31 December 2020, the percentage occupancy was 80%.
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.
The next release of the Quarterly Acute Hospital Activity & NHS Beds publication will be in November 2021.
Publication summary
View the publication summary (PDF, 134KB).