Current status: Answered by Neil Gray on 23 January 2025
To ask the Scottish Government what information it has regarding the number of homeless people who are hospitalised each year who (a) die while receiving treatment and (b) are unable to be discharged due to concerns regarding their welfare.
The number of discharges from Scottish acute inpatient hospitals is presented in the following table. These figures do not include mental health facilities. These discharge figures have been produced using the Public Health Scotland SMR01 dataset which does not hold details on discharges delayed due to concerns regarding welfare.
Table 1: Discharges from Scottish acute hospitals where the patient was recorded as having no fixed abode at hospital admission.
Financial Year | Count of discharges | Count where patient died before discharge |
2014-2015 | 237 | 1 |
2015-2016 | 296 | 1 |
2016-2017 | 312 | 2 |
2017-2018 | 347 | 6 |
2018-2019 | 206 | 1 |
2019-2020 | 230 | 1 |
2020-2021 | 183 | 3 |
2021-2022 | 103 | 2 |
2022-2023 | 62 | 0 |
2023-2024 | 91 | 0 |