NHS Workforce data warehouse

NES have been working on the warehousing of historic and current NHSScotland workforce data. We are pleased to announce that we have completed the first phase of this work, with NHS 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 outputs

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 this publication (released 7 December 2021). 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. A list of the changes to the outputs are available here.

Changes to data

As part of the development of the data warehouse we reviewed historic employment data and made numerous improvements to how these data are 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 the this publication contains a planned revision of employment data (which has impacts on vacancy rate and turnover measures), and sickness absence data as detailed in our revision statement.

We understand that NHS workforce planners often have data requirements that go beyond what we publish in our official statistics. For example, our published statistics do not include employment data by broken down by age group at the granularity required for planning purposes. For this reason, we have previously supplied a wider range of data as Management Information to workforce planners in NHSScotland and the Scottish Government.

In line with the changes to the NHSScotland Workforce publication, we have updated the Management Information workforce dashboard. This dashboard can now be found in the National workforce planning and analysis area and will be refreshed each quarter. Our aim is that we will add further data and analysis over time as we receive feedback from the users.

We also supply a table which contains granular age data for Dentists as Management Information to workforce planners in NHSScotland and the Scottish Government.