NHSScotland Workforce

Information on staff directly employed is sourced from each NHS Board’s human resources and payroll systems. These are dynamic, operational systems and data can change over time. Work is undertaken with NHS Boards to improve data quality and previously published information may change from one publication to the next to reflect these improvements.

COVID-19 Pandemic

¹ A process of accelerated recruitment was undertaken to help NHSScotland to manage the pandemic. This involved several thousand nursing students, from both their 2nd and 3rd year of study, and doctors in their final year of university study, being brought in to work for NHSScotland. Some NHS Boards in order to process the onboarding of these individuals quickly only added their details to the NHS Payroll system, and did not add them to eESS the NHS HR system. In order to accurately count Staff in Post statistics we take data from both systems and if individuals are not recorded on both they are excluded from our statistics. Therefore, the Staff in Post numbers reported here are likely to be an under representation.

Furthermore, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on NHS Board colleagues who normally provide data, we do not have full vacancy data as at 30 June 2020. We have reported all data available in our tables and dashboards.