All NHS Boards within NHS Scotland use eESS as their main HR system and ePayroll as their payroll system. Before eESS, NHS Boards used different HR Systems. The Scottish Workforce Information Standard System (SWISS) brings HR data together with data from ePayroll.
Workforce information was first captured through SWISS in 2007 for the data as at 30th September 2007.
SWISS holds individual level information for all staff directly paid by NHS Boards and includes variables on the employee, their current post(s), absences and earnings. SWISS is refreshed from eESS on a daily basis and from ePayroll on a weekly basis.
Now all NHS Boards use eESS we will be switching to using eESS data instead of SWISS. This is planned for the second half of 2025.
NES extracts employment data from SWISS on the second Tuesday of the month for staff employed on the last day of the previous month. For example, an extract of all staff at 31 March 2021 was taken on 13 April 2021. The lag between the census date and extraction date is to allow time for the source systems to be updated. The extraction dates are published on the data provision timetable.
An employment must have:
Furthermore, not all staff recorded on local HR and payroll systems are directly employed by NHS Scotland; we therefore run a series of exclusions in agreement with NHS Boards. These are:
Once data are extracted, they are transformed and loaded in to a Data Warehouse within NES. Transformation includes merging with the Resident doctor (previously known as Doctors in Training) data sourced from NES’s Turas People system which allows accurate reporting of board of placement and specialty. Employment data are stored from 2009.
There are two measures of employment used in our publications.
An individual staff member is identified by their National Insurance Number.
Headcount is the distinct count of National Insurance Numbers. If an employee has more than one employment contract they’ll only be counted once in each group. This means that adding up headcount sub-totals may produce different results than the published grand totals. For example, if a staff member is employed in two NHS Boards, they would be counted once in each NHS Board, and once in NHS Scotland.
Whole time equivalent (sometimes referred to as Full Time Equivalent) is defined as:
where Contracted Hours is the number of hours that an employee is contracted to work in one week, and conditioned hours is the number of hours that a full-time employee would work.
The conditioned hours for Agenda for Change staff have changed over time:
The conditioned hours for medical and dental and senior management staff is 40 hours.
Employment data from 2009 are reported for 31 March, 30 June, 30 September, and 31 December censuses each year.
The data show the number of staff employed by NHS Scotland by location (NHS Board), occupation (job family, sub job family or medical specialty), AfC band or medical grade, contract type and demographic (sex, age group, median age) indicators.
In addition to these variables, data are used to report the following:
NES extracts employment data on the second Tuesday of the month for staff employed on the last day of the previous month. The lag between the census date and extraction date is to allow time for the source systems to be updated. However, sometimes the extract may include people who are employed but not recorded and people who are not employed but are recorded. Overall, the number included or excluded in error is small and is consistent over time. We do not routinely revise data for previous time points when data is updated or corrected at source.
Data related to employees’ pay, such as WTE and band or grade, is often high quality as it is monitored by both employee and employer. Data describing occupations, whilst of high quality, is more susceptible to errors.
Occupation information for agenda for change, or non-medical, staff are available in Job Family and Sub Job Family. The occupational coding structure within NHS Scotland is guided by the NHS Scotland Job Evaluation Good Practice Guide and NHS National Job profiles. However, some of the sub job families recently added to the national job profiles are not available within eESS.
Medical specialty is the specialty of the area that doctor is working in, this may be different from the specialty that they are registered with on the GMC, or different from the specialty of the training programme they are on. This allows for the reporting of the number of doctors who are delivering a service within an area. Resident doctors who are perhaps on a general medical core training programme, but working in a Obstetrics and Gynaecology department will be recorded under that category, alongside consultants, and Foundation Year 1 and 2 doctors who are also working there. This may undercount some specialties were a consultant with a more specific specialty is working. For example, a consultant on the psychotherapy specialist register may be working in an General Psychiatry area.
Medical Grade is used to report a doctors grade. When this is not complete, we use Pay Grade.
Demographic data on age and sex is likely to be accurate but relies on individual employees completing paperwork correctly when they start. In a small number of cases, an individual’s demographic data is updated in source systems due to corrections. Data on other equality and diversity characteristics aren’t mandatory and are less well completed.
Our quality assurance processes describe how we work with providers to maximise the quality of the data.
We assessed our processes in January 2025 against the Quality Assurance of administrative data framework.
Quality assurance
A number of steps are in place to ensure that these data are reported accurately.
1. Workforce information is sourced from NHS Board HR and payroll systems. These are dynamic operational systems in which the data can change over time due to their live nature and potential additional updates made by NHS Boards. Accuracy of coding is crucial to the quality of the data. The responsibility for data accuracy lies with the Boards providing the data and Board-level quality assurance practices are described below. However, NES seeks to further minimise data inaccuracies by maintaining lists of data providers and providing them with a detailed data quality report based on the extract taken prior to the publication census extract. This allows Boards to check that staff records are accurate at a global level and in regard to specific staff groups, and to amend any potentially incorrect data at source ahead of the publication extract. The QA report provided by NES includes:
2. Census data are then extracted from SWISS and added to NES' workforce data warehouse where further processing occurs, such as allocating occupational codes, and joining data for doctors and dentists in training data with Turas People. NES carries out a second phase of quality assurance at this point which involves: (i) checking for any obvious errors or missing values in the data, and (ii) comparing figures with previous extracts for any unusual trends/outliers. When necessary, NES raises any large inconsistencies with data providers.
3. Reporting software, PowerBI and Excel tables, are then refreshed to include the new data. The outputs are checked to ensure the values are shown accurately and any additional points of clarity are noted in notes pages or interactive tooltips.
4. These data are part of the two-week early release quality assurance process where outputs are made available to NHS Boards to confirm as accurate. Communication with NHS Boards over this period allows us to confirm or update any of these data ahead of release to the public.
The above quality assurance processes result in trustworthy information being released as part of the NHSScotland Workforce publication and reduce the likelihood of any issues arising after publication.
Board-level data quality assurance
SWISS sources its HR data from eESS, a single national approach to HR data management for NHS Scotland. The national eESS team supports Boards with the operation of eESS and SWISS through the publication of Standard Operating Procedures, best practice guidance, and reporting functions aimed at ensuring data completeness and robustness.
Best practice guidance for Board HR teams outlines daily, weekly, and monthly data management activities.
One such weekly activity is to action a data quality dashboard to ensure data is complete and robust for local and national reporting. The reports available through this dashboard have been partly developed with regard to the workforce statistics published by NES (formerly by ISD). Example checks include
(Data quality dashboard SOP approved by reports working group 2019. Last updated 5 February 2021)
Limitations
Sometimes there may be occasions where these data cannot be verified before they are extracted, for example due to turnover or absences of staff updating the systems. In these occasions, NES will work with providers to highlight any important quality assurance or intelligence to our end users.
Detailed information on occupations are not always available in the source data. This has led to the creation of a number manual surveys to identify staff roles in more detail (for example the managed pharmacy workforce survey).
There will likely be small discrepancies in the numbers reported locally (by NHS Boards) and nationally (by NES). This may be because the data are extracted from the live system at different times, or that the methods of extraction and processing are not the same (for example, inclusion of bank staff).
This system allows NES to report the number of staff employed in NHSScotland. This may be different from the number of staff actually working at any given time (for example due to rostering arrangements or absences).