This page was designed to alert users to changes to organisations, workforce roles and data collection can impact the reporting of data. As part of the work to improve our statistics and provide a more complete list of data quality issues that have occurred over the time this data has been produced, a data quality document is now produced alongside the NHS Workforce publication which details ongoing and past events, data quality issues, coding and methodology updates in a chronological order.
December 2025
During the transition to using data directly sourced from eESS, we found an issue with how Location of Service Delivery information is passed from eESS to SWISS. When someone moved to a job where no Location of Service Delivery was recorded, this change did not update properly in SWISS. As a result, the previous location was still shown.
As such we have removed all Location of Service Delivery data from the Official Statistics publication released on 2 December 2025.
We will continue to review the added value of publishing data describing the location of staff.
August 2021
We have completed a review into the Location of Service Delivery and Country of Qualification data in the NHSScotland Workforce publication to ensure it meets the Official Statistics standard. This means checking the Trustworthiness, Quality and Value as outlined in the Code of Practice for Statistics.
We have analysed the feedback provided by users and a short summary of the outcome of this review, and how it will affect Official Statistics reporting, is below. Full details, including proposed plans, are available.
Please get in touch with us if you have any questions.
Location of Service Delivery (LoSD)
In its current state, LoSD has reduced value to our users because of the quality of data. However, reporting grouped location data would be of value to many users if it can be robust. This is something that has also been recognised in other projects.
In order to understand and assess the requirements for reporting location groupings in more detail we propose running a workshop with key stakeholders. Whilst this assessment is undertaken, we will continue to publish LoSD with a note identifying that it is under review.
Country of Qualification (CoQ)
Responses from data providers highlighted that there are two places which CoQ can be sourced: (i) the professional body section in eESS and (ii) the GMC interface. The first is currently used to report the data. Respondents overwhelmingly do not use CoQ data from this source for reporting or analysis because there is no business need.
We will report CoQ data as it is sourced in the forthcoming Workforce Official Statistics publication (30 June census released 7 September). Thereafter, these data will not be released as part of the publication. We will continue to monitor information requests which could be answered using these data.
Data from many systems are used to report NHS workforce data. In November 2021, NES has completed the first phase of our new data warehouse, with historic and current NHSScotland employment data now warehoused and a new data model developed to support our publication reports.
The implementation of the warehouse will affect users of the NHSScotland Workforce Official Statistics publication in two main ways.
Changes to reports
In conjunction with the data warehouse project, we reviewed the outputs of the NHSScotland Workforce Official Statistics publication with a group of stakeholders and experts in user experience. After successfully testing with some of our end users, we will be publishing new reports in our next release. The largest change is the introduction of a new single NHSScotland workforce dashboard which will replace most of the previous dashboards and the Excel tables. This dashboard has improved navigation, filtering, table (including export functionality) and chart views of the workforce data.
Changes to data
As part of the development of the data warehouse we reviewed historic employment data and made numerous improvements to how this data is processed and reported. As a result of these improvements there will be some minor differences between the statistics published from the warehouse compared with previously published statistics. This means that this publication will contain a planned revision of employment data (which has impacts on vacancy rate and turnover measures), and sickness absence data.
The changes mentioned above will affect the NHSScotland Workforce Official Statistics released on 7 December 2021 (30 September 2020 census).
The above changes do not affect the Psychology Services Workforce and CAMHS Workforce publications.
NHS Scotland CAMHS workforce working in NHS Agenda for Change pay grades were given a reduction in their working hours from 37.5 hours to 37 hours in a week.
As part of updating the hours in the CAMHS database, the following steps were taken to ensure the data held in the database are accurate:
All records of staff working in agenda for change pay grade were automatically updated to 37 hours by the IT service provider prior to the June 2024 extract.
An extract containing the updated information of staff working in agenda change pay grades were sent to data providers.
Data providers were requested to confirm the new hours are accurate and in case of discrepancies, the data were updated in the database.
All calculations used for the analysis were updated to reflect one Whole Time Equivalent is 37 hours.
Three NHS Boards host regional inpatient units: NHS Lothian, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Tayside.
In addition from these three Boards, some members of staff also show time recorded working with Inpatient Psychiatric units. Further to a query raised from a health board data user, a review was conducted to check the accuracy of this data by providing an extract of Inpatient Psychiatric unit hours and excluding Psychiatric unit (Community) hours to the data providers to verify the hours and units the members of staff work in. Further work is being done to understand this data.
Following the rebased population estimates published by National Records of Statistics from mid 2011 to mid 2021, the publication data for CAMHS and Psychology workforce per 100,000 of the population and for CAMHS workforce working in target age 0-18 year olds per 100,000 of the population were updated in the December 2024 publications.