The National Treatment Centre (NTC) programme is an investment by the Scottish Government to support a national network of purpose-built healthcare facilities across Scotland for planned and diagnostic care. The new facilities will provide:
The workforce is critical to the delivery of NTC service. The 2021 NHS Recovery Plan stated a commitment to “recruit an additional 1,500 staff over the lifetime of this Plan, to support the accelerated delivery of the National Treatment Centre’s Programme”. It therefore supports the public good to report the workforce who will be placed in NTCs, and the number of people employed by the Scottish Government’s additional funding.
These figures were first released as management information in June 2023 and to the public as Official Statistics in Development in December 2023. Shortly afterwards, the Scottish Government instructed all health boards to immediately stop development of all NHS projects not already in construction, including National Treatment Centres, due to budget constraints. We continue to report on the workforce twice a year.
Only staff who are directly employed by an NHS Board are included. The employment data are sourced from Scottish workforce information system (SWISS). These data are augmented with data for resident doctors from Turas People so that accurate board of placement and specialty can be reported.
The Scottish Government’s additional funding for the National Waiting Times Centre (NWTC) covers two phases of recruitment. Recruitment for phase 1 development of the Eye Centre was completed in early 2021, and recruitment for phase 2 of the NWTC expansion started in 2021 and is ongoing.
Due to the hybrid workforce model and financial coding structure, NWTC are unable to adopt the financial coding to identify staff employed by the Scottish Government’s additional funding. NES and data providers at NWTC worked closely to develop a solution for reporting the additionally funded workforce. This process took the Code of Practice for Statistics into consideration, focussing specifically on methods, quality assurance processes, and the relevant limitations and risks. We engaged with key stakeholders throughout.
The agreed approach involves NWTC providing NES with an extract from their recruitment tracker monitoring the status of each post financed by the Scottish Government’s additional funding.
National guidance was circulated to data providers explaining the use of financial coding to identify staff employed by the Scottish Government’s additional funding in an NTC. This method requires health boards to introduce the finance codes and then send the finance codes to NES.
Staff working in an NTC are identified in the employment data using the finance codes provided from boards. In the case where a person’s employment is split between NTC and non-NTC roles, additional HR fields are used to identify the proportion of that person’s time that is allocated to the NTC.
The workforce reported includes people employed by the Scottish Government’s additional funding in an NTC. Staff working in an NTC who are not employed using the additional funding, for example, existing services relocated to an NTC, are not included in these figures.
NTCs who have opened by 2025 are included: Golden Jubilee Phase 1 (Nov 2020), NHS Fife (March 2023), and NTC Highland (April 2023), NHS Forth Valley (2024), and Golden Jubilee Phase 2 (2024). .
The NWTC extract are linked to the SWISS employment data to identify the people who are still in post at the latest published census.
The workforce reported includes people employed by the Scottish Government’s additional funding in an NTC. Staff working in an NTC who are not employed using the additional funding, for example, existing services relocated to an NTC, are not included in these figures. These data are updated in a NTC dashboard twice a year in June (31 March census) and December (30 September census).
A report estimating the number of people employed by the Scottish Government’s additional funding in the National Treatment Centres, and how many of these people are new entrants to NHS Scotland is also published twice a year in June (31 March census) and December (30 September census).
In addition to the processes in place to assess the SWISS quality, we are in touch with data suppliers and NTC contacts within each health boards to check finance codes and the employment figures are accurate.
The main limitation of this approach is that the measurement for the additionally funded workforce at NWTC is not directly comparable to that used for other Boards due to the different data sources available. The data available from NWTC only includes those recruited first to each of the additional funded posts. More specifically, if a person recruited leaves an additional funded post, back fill for this post is not reported via the recruitment tracker. It is therefore not possible to track any person who is subsequently recruited, and the number of people employed will be under-reported. Assuming that NWTC replaces any individuals who leave, the difference between number recruited and number still employed is an estimate of the scale of under-reporting.