Quarter ending 31 March 2024
Official Statistics
Published: 04 June 2024
This release by NHS Education for Scotland (NES) provides phase one of the quarterly update, as at 31 March 2024. This includes the number of staff directly employed by NHS Scotland and the number of vacant posts there were for nursing and midwifery staff, allied health professions, and medical and dental consultants. When describing the size of a particular staff group figures are presented as headcount (actual number of staff).
From the first of April 2024 NHS Agenda for Change staff saw a reduction in their working week from 37.5 hours to 37 hours. The process to update the contracted and conditioned hours for this change in Scottish Workforce Information Standard System (SWISS) did not work as expected and as a result, the Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) calculations were incorrect. We are working with partner organisations to update the data and will publish this data once the updates have taken place and our investigations into this change have completed. More information about what data is available in this phase and the data we have planned for the second phase can be found on our Publication timetable.
Total staff
Turnover calculations exclude medical and dental staff who are on training grades.
Medical and dental
Nursing and midwifery
Allied health professions
Administrative service
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.
The next scheduled quarterly release of this publication will be 3 September 2024. For up to date information on the release of phase two of the March census, please see the Publication timetable.
Publications prior to 3 December 2019 can be accessed via the ISD Workforce publication page.