Out of hours primary care services in Scotland
January 2017 to July 2024

About this release

Revised on 4 September 2024. Revisions have been made to the excel file that looks at type of consultation. These affect total consultations and “other” consultations between September 2021 and May 2024. The impact of these changes are minimal and are correct in previous publications.

This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) provides new figures on Primary Care Out of Hours (PC OOH) service activity for the month of July 2024. Trend data includes COVID-19 Hub/ Assessment centre activity from March 2020 to March 2022, as this was managed by the PC OOH services in the out of hours period. Unplanned Accident and Emergency (A&E) attendances during the out of hours period are also presented up to July 2024. PC OOH data is missing for August - September 2022 due to a system outage.

Main points

• In July 2024, there were around 70,500 consultations at PC OOH services, a decrease (down by 17%) compared to July 2023. The number of unplanned A&E attendances in the out of hours periods has also decreased compared to July 2023 (down by 5%).

This Chart looks at monthly Primary Care OOH Cases and Consultations between January 2017 and July 2024. It also shows the number of unplanned A&E attendances in the out of hours period. During the summer A&E services have more attendances in the out of hours period, than OOH Primary Care cases possibly as a result of longer daylight hours and greater risk of injuries. During the winter months and months with public holidays there are more OOH Primary Care cases.

Close

Monthly Primary Care Out of Hours activity and Unplanned A&E attendances - Scotland (Out of Hours period), January 2017 to July 2024

• More recent trend data comparing A&E attendances to PC OOH consultations looks markedly different to older historical patterns (January 2017 to February 2020). This may reflect changes to patient pathways introduced by the Redesign of Urgent Care in December 2020.
• The ratio of consultations to cases rose during the COVID-19 pandemic which was driven by a higher use of telephone consultations. This fell after the COVID-19 community pathway was closed at the end of March 2022 and continued to fall from June 2022 when a more accurate method of identifying cases was introduced.
• Pre pandemic, consistently nearly 60% of consultations took place in a Primary Care Emergency Centre (PCEC), but this has shifted to phone consultations during and following the pandemic. For the month July 2024, at Scotland level, only 39% of consultations were in a PCEC, slightly lower than the 42% which were by telephone.

Background

From April 2014, data on activity at PC OOH services have been submitted by NHS Boards across Scotland and maintained by PHS in the national data warehouse. The OOH period for this publication includes evenings, weekends and Easter, Christmas and New Year public holidays. Between March 2020 and the end of March 2022 people calling NHS 24 with the main symptoms of COVID-19 were managed via a dedicated pathway. Patient consultations are recorded as an attendance at Primary Care Emergency Centres (PCEC), Home Visits and/or PC OOH advice. An OOH patient contact/case can have more than one consultation type (e.g. telephone advice followed by home visit). The A&E attendances reported is based on unplanned data only and excludes new planned attendances introduced as part of the Redesign of Urgent care in 2020 as well as other types of planned attendances. Further information on data on PC OOH service can be found on the metadata section of the web pages.

Further information

The date for the next release of this publication will be 1 October 2024 and monthly thereafter.