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 be an important resource both locally and nationally providing:
Healthcare standards - National Treatment Centres
The National Treatment Centre programme is a key component of the National Recovery Plan, and the workforce is critical to the delivery of service.
The following health boards have opened a NTC: Golden Jubilee Phase 1 (Nov 2020), NHS Fife (March 2023), and NTC Highland (April 2023), NHS Forth Valley (later in 2024), and Golden Jubilee Phase 2 (later in 2023).
These data are reported twice a year in June (with data at 31 March) and December (with data at 30 September).
Late 2023, due to budget constraints, the Scottish Government instructed all health boards to immediately stop development of all NHS projects not already in construction. This included National Treatment Centres not in construction.
NTC statistics were first reported in 2023 as Official Statistics in Development (OSID). NES have continued to publish these statistics for NTCs that had opened prior to the pause in construction.
The employment figures include staff who are directly employed by a NHS Board in Scotland.
The main employment data are derived from SWISS. Medical doctors in training data are sourced from NES' Turas People system which allows accurate reporting of trainee board of placement and specialty. SWISS and Turas People data are linked to maximise the value of data held in each system.
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.
Identifying the National Waiting Times Centre workforce
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. These data are linked to the SWISS employment data to identify the people who are still in post at the latest published census.
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.
These data have been quality assured locally and nationally and go through the usual Early and Pre-Release Access processes.
Whilst the processes were being developed there were a few data quality issues:
1. The number published for NHS Fife is under-reported by approximately 10 WTE at 30 September 2023. These people work across portering and domestic teams across a range of sites in NHS Fife and the local systems were not updated in time for the September census.
2. NHS Fife and National Waiting Times Centre were unable to introduce finance codes to identify staff in time for the 31 March 2023 census. As a result, a different approach had to be taken. These boards provided information on people employed by the Scottish Government’s additional funding in the NTCs at 31 March 2023. These figures are not included in the charts and tables in this dashboard.