Acute hospital activity and NHS beds information (quarterly)
Quarter ending 31 December 2021
A National Statistics publication for Scotland
- Published
- 31 May 2022
- Type
- Statistical report
- Author
- Public Health Scotland
Data summary
This release does not include specific COVID-19 information; visit our COVID-19 webpages for PHS COVID-19 information or the Scottish Government website (external website) for information on COVID-19 in Scotland.
Information published prior to September 2019 is listed on the Hospital Care publication page (external website).
Main points
Please note that this release includes Scotland going into emergency measures due to COVID-19. During this pandemic, NHS boards, hospitals and healthcare providers have been required to change their normal way of working to manage their COVID-19 response. As such, this is directly impacting on the volume of hospital activity and trends observed over the past couple of years. For example, inpatient and day case activity and outpatient activity have reduced by 17% and 13%, respectively, when comparing October to December 2021 to the same quarter of 2019 (pre-pandemic). However, activity levels have generally been recovering from July 2020 onwards, but are still not up to pre-pandemic levels.
Inpatients and day cases
There were 229,209 hospital admissions between 1 October and 31 December 2021. Of these, 51% (116,344) were emergency admissions, 9% (20,237) elective admissions and 40% (90,888) day cases.
Beds
There were on average 13,434 available staffed beds per day for all acute specialties in the quarter ending 31 December 2021. 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 2021, the percentage occupancy was 85%.
Outpatients
p - Provisional.
There were under one million (936,195) outpatient attendances between 1 October and 31 December 2021. Of these, 33% (307,613 attendances) were new cases. The remaining 67% (628,582 attendances) were patients returning for follow-up appointments.
Data quality
There are known issues with the quality of data presented. For more information, please see the Data quality and Trend data sections.
Further information
The data for the most recent quarter are provisional. Provisional data are 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 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 are available to download from the Data files and Data explorer sections of our website and from the Scottish Health and Social Care Open Data platform (external website). Supplementary outpatient data are accessible in the COVID Wider Impacts Dashboard (external website).
Information published prior to September 2019 is listed on the Hospital Care publication page (external website). Background information on hospital care can be found in the Hospital Care topic web page (external website).
The next release of the Quarterly Acute Hospital Activity & NHS Beds publication will be in November 2022.
Publication summary
View the publication summary (PDF, 359 KB).