Health and Care Experience survey
2024

About this release

The Scottish Health and Care Experience (HACE) Survey is a postal survey which was sent to a random sample of people who were registered with a General Practice in Scotland based on latest information available on the 25 September 2023. Questionnaires were sent out in October and November 2023 asking about people’s experiences during the previous 12 months.

The results of the latest survey were released on 28 May 2024. A national report with supplementary tables (external website), technical report (external website) and further information about this survey, including a copy of the questionnaire and reports from previous years, are available from the Scottish Government (external website).

The survey covers five areas of health and care experience:

• Your General Practice
• Treatment or advice from your General Practice
• Out of hours healthcare
• Care, support and help with everyday living
• Caring responsibilities

Levels of reporting available

• Scotland
• NHS board
• Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP)
• General Practice cluster
• General Practice

Dashboards

Seven interactive dashboards are available and present the results from the 2024 survey along with time trends for all surveys since 2016, where questions are comparable. These seven dashboards can be accessed via the menu on this page.

Methodology

Weighting

Results at all levels of reporting are weighted to provide results which are more representative of the population. Details of the weighting methodology are available from the Scottish Government (external website).

The results in the 'About the respondents' dashboard are presented unweighted to provide information about the people who responded to the survey.

Statistical testing

Statistical comparisons are available.

• Results from local areas were compared to Scotland.
• Results from the 2024 survey were compared to the 2022 survey at Scotland, NHS board and Health & Social Care Partnership level where the same question was asked in both surveys.

Comparisons were tested at the five per cent significance level. Due to the large sample size, even small changes of less than one per cent may be statistically significant.

Percentages

Percentages quoted within these dashboards have been rounded to the nearest whole number. This means that they do not always add up to 100 in the charts shown.

Small numbers

The dashboards display the number of responses that the results are based upon. Results for questions have been suppressed where there were fewer than 20 responses as they may be unrepresentative and may risk identifying respondents. Where results are shown but the number of responses is small, care should be taken in interpreting these. At General Practice level, an interpretation warning is displayed when either fewer than 100 responses were received from patients registered with the practice, or the response rate was lower than 15%.

More information about the survey design, response rates and methodology can be found in the technical report (external website) available from the Scottish Government (external website).