Care Home Statistics for Scotland
Support and services funded by Health and Social Care Partnerships in Scotland 2023/24

About this release

This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) provides information on care home services funded by Health and Social Care Partnerships in Scotland throughout financial year 2023/24. This includes number of people residing in a care home for at least one or more days during the year, the type and median length of stay, demographic breakdown of care home residents and service provider of the care home. It also reports emergency healthcare (emergency admissions, bed days and A&E attendances) for the long-term residents. The information in this publication differs from that presented in PHS's Care Home Census which reports on different indicators such as; number of care homes, registered places, residents, admissions and discharges for all care home placements for all care home residents regardless of the source funding the care home stay.

Main points

• During 2023/24 there were an estimated 49,565 people who resided in a care home. This was a decrease of less than 1% from 2022/23 and the majority of people were long stay residents.
• The majority of care home residents in 2023/24 were aged 85 or over. The ongoing trend remains that there were nearly 3 times as many females than males within that age group.
• Around 80% of all local authority funded stays are resident within a private care home. This figure remains the same as reported in 2022/23.
• In 2023/24 64.2% of long stay residents received nursing care, this is an increase of 0.9% from 2022/23.
• In quarter January - March 2024 around 9% of long stay residents had an emergency admission to hospital and around 11% of long stay residents attended A&E.

This graphs shows the number of care home residents by all stays, long stays and short stays from 2018/19 to 2023/24. The total number of stays is around 49,500. The majority of these stays are long stays at around 45,000. The short stays have decreased from around 9,000 in 2018/19 to just under 5,500 in 2023/24.

Close

Number of people supported in a Care Home by type of stay, Scotland, 2018/19 - 2023/24.

Background

Care Homes provide accommodation and personal care for people who need extra support in their daily lives. The information provided in this publication includes people who reside in a Care Home and are fully or partially funded by the Local Authority. Please note people entirely self-funding their care home placement are not included. The data in this report differs from the care home census report as it reports on people who have been in a care home one or more days in the year and are fully or partially funded by the Local authority.

Not all partnerships were able to provide data on care home services and estimates are included. Further information on data completeness and estimation are provided in the dashboards.

In order to develop these statistics and due to the changes in the collection and processing, the figures in this release are classified as ‘Official Statistics in development’. Further information on the data collection is available on the PHS website.

Further information

The next release of this publication will be October 2025.