NHS Gender Identity Clinics: Waiting Times for First Outpatient Consultation

About this release

The NHS Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) quarterly aggregate data collection was introduced in April 2023 to collect national data on waiting times for adult and young person gender identity clinics in Scotland. It focuses on referrals, number and wait length of patients seen by a specialist for the first time, and number of individuals waiting and length of ongoing wait.

Main points

A stacked bar chart showing the total number of ongoing waits at the end of each quarter from June 2023 to March 2024. The bars show length of wait categories up to 1 year, 1 to 2 years, 2 to 3 years, 4 to 5 years, and over 5 years. The graph shows that the proportion of waits under 3 years is decreasing while the number and proportion of waits 4 years and over is increasing.

Close

Length of ongoing wait at each quarter end in NHSScotland Gender Identity Clinics, quarters ending June 2023 to March 2025

Based on the data provided by clinics:

• The number of referrals to NHS Gender Identity Services in 2024/25 decreased by 9% (-147) compared to the previous year (from 1,676 to 1,529). Almost half of referrals in 2024/25 were received for people aged 18 to 24 years (698, 46%), and over a fifth were for those aged 25 to 34 years (339, 22%).
• At 31 March 2025 there were 6,121 people waiting for a first outpatient appointment at an NHS GIC. This represents an 16% increase (+848) from the 5,273 people waiting at 30 June 2023.
• Since initial referral to a gender identity clinic, those who had been waiting two years or less accounted for almost three-fifths of all ongoing waits at 30 June 2023 (59%, 3,122). This decreased to just over two in five (43%, 2,641) at 31 March 2025. During the same period, the number of waits ongoing for longer than five years increased almost 16-fold from 45 to 716 (+1,491%, +671).
• 700 individuals had a first outpatient appointment with an NHS gender identity specialist in 2024/25, an increase of 101 (+17%) on the previous year. This is due to increases in NHS Lothian (+163, +43%), NHS Highland (+64, +229%), and NHS Grampian (+7, +16%). The number of completed first appointments at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde decreased by over 90% during the same time period.

Background

The Scottish Government’s Programme for Government for 2021-2022 gave a commitment to improve access to NHS Gender Identity Services, including an action to ‘Commission Public Health Scotland (PHS) to establish robust national waiting times data collection and reporting for gender identity services.’ This report is based on quarterly data collected and analysed in response to this commission. The label 'Official Statistics in development' is applied to statistics that are undergoing development and testing, but are deemed useful to publish to enable users and stakeholders to comment on their development while quality improvement work is ongoing. The limitations that apply to the interpretation of these data are presented in the main report.