Overview
Public Services Delivery Scotland is responsible for the production of seven official statistics publications:
These publications report employment and training data for different workforce groups. The data provided are used to support local, regional and national workforce planning and to support planning for education and training.
Public Services Scotland Scotland follows the Code of Practice for Statistics to ensure each publication meets the standards required.
The NHS Scotland Workforce publication provides information on all staff directly employed by NHS Scotland and the General Practitioners and Primary Care Dentist workforce.
The NHS is Scotland's largest employer. Its workforce has a significant role to play in the delivery of quality services that meet the needs of patients, their families and the general public in a modern health service.
All staff directly employed by NHS Scotland are included in this publication, such as Doctors and Dentists, Nurses and Midwives and Allied Health Professionals. A range of information on the staff in post, vacancies, band and agency costs, sickness absence, turnover, and consultant contract are provided. These data are sourced from different systems and are released at different times throughout the year.
NHS Scotland workforce in other publications
The CAMHS Workforce in NHS Scotland publication report information for the CAMHS workforce in NHS Scotland respectively. These data are collected in bespoke system which allows more detailed occupation information to be reported.
CAMHS provide essential assessment, care and treatment of children and young people (and their parents/carers) who are experiencing serious mental health problems.
CAMHS workforce information is sourced from the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service Workforce Database which is updated directly by staff employed in the CAMHS service. This captures clinical staff working in multi-disciplinary teams including nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, support workers and therapists. Most of these staff are directly employed by NHS Scotland, but some posts are funded by other sources.
CAMHS workforce in other publications
Staff will only be recorded in multiple publications provided they are captured in all source systems. The occupational coding is structured differently in these systems, which means it is not possible to accurately match the professional group across the publications.
The Psychology Services Workforce publication report information for the Psychology services in NHS Scotland respectively. These data are collected in bespoke system which allows more detailed occupation information to be reported.
NHS Scotland has seen a steadily increasing demand for access to Applied Psychologists and Psychological Therapies due to the growing evidence base for the effectiveness of psychological interventions in delivering positive health change for people with a wide range of clinical conditions.
Psychology workforce information is sourced from the Clinical Psychology Services Workforce Database which is updated directly by staff employed in the Service. This captures clinical staff directly employed by NHS Scotland working in multi-disciplinary teams including applied psychologists and those providing psychological therapy.
Psychology workforce in other publications
Staff will only be recorded in multiple publications provided they are captured in all source systems. The occupational coding is structured differently in these systems, which makes it difficult to accurately match the professional group across the publications.
The General Practice Workforce survey reports information on numbers, vacancies and absences of General Practitioners (GPs), Nurses and other primary care staff and use of GP locum staff in Scotland.
The Primary Care Out of Hours Survey reports the number of General Practitioners and nurses working in Primary Care Out of Hours services, challenges and experiences in filling shifts in the past year and use of multi-disciplinary teams within Out of Hours.
The Medical specialty training and transition to the GP workforce publication provides the number of doctors starting and completing General Practice (GP) specialty training programme in each year, the transition probability between the start of specialty training and completion, and between completion of specialty training and participation in the GP workforce. The publication also includes the number of doctors participating in the GP workforce together with the inflows and outflows of GPs that determine this number.
This publication is released as Official Statistics in Development. The first release was in December 2025 and was accompanied by a development plan describing how we would develop the publication during 2026.
In May 2026, we announced that we are making changes to this plan. The 30 June 2026 publication will contain GP training only.
In line with our original plan, the June publication will add Training Region and Health Board breakdowns of the GP training and employment data. We have also made several presentational improvements to the dashboard in response to feedback.
However, we will not be including all other medical specialties in this publication as we had intended. There are two reasons for this change. The first is the scale of the effort needed to quality assure the figures, which we had not fully appreciated when we produced only the GP figures. We are currently identifying the right educators to consult about the training figures in each specialty. We anticipate having to review the background to the statistics with a number of them, so we will need to allow additional time to ensure we support them properly.
The second reason is that the link between our training and employment data appears not to be as robust for other specialties as it is for General Practice (which uses a different employment data set). Our preferred unique identifier, GMC number, is not complete across the training and employment data sets, and we will need to investigate alternative methods of record linking to describe the transition from training to the consultant workforce. We will be working with our data engineers to explore and evaluate the options.
The December 2026 publication will remain “in development”
The content of the December 2026 publication is therefore dependent on our progress with quality assurance and record linkage.
We had originally planned to remove the “in development” label at this point but it is highly likely we will still be developing the publication. We aim to include other specialties’ training data, though it’s possible we may only be able to include a selection of specialties while we continue to work on the others.
We will not commit at this stage to including any employment transition data for other medical specialties as we haven’t yet identified the best method for linking the training and employment data.
In September 2026 we will provide a further report on progress and another update to the development plan.
The NHS Scotland Mental Health Workforce publication will show the number of staff in post who work in NHS Scotland mental health services. It will include:
On 30 June 2026, PSD Scotland will publish new statistics about the mental health workforce in NHS Scotland. These statistics use a new method that helps us count, for the first time, staff working in NHS Scotland mental health services for all age groups.
These will be released as Official Statistics in Development (OSID). In line with the Office for Statistics Regulation’s (OSR) guidance on producing OSID, we have produced a development plan which outlines the content of the statistics and the rationale for producing them, the timing of releases, and the expected users of the statistics.