Care at Home Statistics for Scotland
Support and services funded by Health and Social Care Partnerships in Scotland 2023/2024

About this release

This annual release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) provides information on people receiving care at home support and services in Scotland for financial year 2023/24. This includes number and rates of people receiving care at home services and number of hours of care provided. It also reports on emergency admissions, bed days and A&E attendances for some of these clients.

Care at Home is care tailored to the needs of an individual that is provided in a person’s own home. Packages of care can include support with personal care (for example bathing and hair washing) but also support with other tasks around the house (for example cleaning or meal preparation).

Main points

• The number of people who received Care at Home support in 2023/24 was an estimated 97,585. This is an increase of 5% from 92,400 people in 2022/23.

• The estimated number of hours of Care at Home received in 2023/24 was just over 40.9 million. This is an increase of 4% from 39.3 million 2022/23.

• Around 88% of people receiving Care at Home services in quarter January-March 2023/24 receive personal care.

• Throughout 2023/24 for the Care at home support funded by the Health and Social Care Partnerships, the Private sector provided just under half of the Care at Home services (49%), followed by Local authorities (43%).

• In 2023/24, of people receiving Care at Home 48% also had a community alarm or telecare. This is a reduction of 2 percentage points from 2022/23.

• In 2023/24, looking at deprivation there were 25.3% of Care at home clients who were within the most deprived quintile whilst 14.5% were in the least deprived quintile.

This is a bar chart showing the percentage of people receiving care at home by deprivation quintile from 2017/18 to 2023/24. The bar chart shows that the percentage of people within each deprivation quintile is consistent across the years. Quintile 1 has the highest percentage of around 25%, quintile 2 has the second highest percentage of around 22%, quintile 3 has the third highest percentage of around 21%, quintile 4 has the second lowest percentage of 17% and deprivation quintile 5 has the lowest percentage of 14.5%.

Close

Care at Home population by deprivation quintile, Scotland (All Areas Submitted).

In Scotland the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) is used to measure deprivation. It combines information on income, employment, education, housing, health, crime and geographical access. For this analysis, the area of concern (Scotland) were divided into five equal groups based on population size. Deprivation quintile 1 relates to the most deprived areas and deprivation quintile 5 relates to the least deprived areas. SIMD 2020v2 was used for the analysis.

Background

Information is provided for people whose Care at Home service is fully or partially funded by the Local Authority. The services can be delivered through Local Authority in-house teams, independent providers and the Third Sector. Note people entirely self-funding their care are not included.
Not all partnerships were able to provide on care at home service/support and estimates are included. Further information on data completeness and estimation are provided in the dashboards.

Further information

The next release of this publication will be November 2025.

Due to data collection and processing changes, and to give users the opportunity to provide feedback on their development, the figures in this release are classified as 'Experimental Statistics'. Further information on the data collection is available on the PHS website.