Chamber and committees

Health and Social Care Partnerships provide Public Health Scotland with a weekly snapshot of the current demand for Care at Home services. The data includes information on the total number of hours of care that people were waiting to receive, following an assessment of their needs. This information is available via the following weblink: Dashboard - People requiring a social care assessment and care at home services.

Please note that the information does not include the reasons why these hours of care were yet to be provided, nor does the Scottish Government hold information on local social care staffing levels.

While the Scottish Government has overall responsibility for health and social care support policy in Scotland, it is for local Integration Joint Boards (IJBs) to ensure that social care support services are in place to provide their population with the appropriate support in the right place and at the right time.

The Scottish Government understands the pressures faced and have invested a record £21.7 billion in health and social care in 2025-26, which includes almost £2.2 billion for social care and integration

However, it is important to note that while the Scottish Government has overall responsibility for health and social care support policy in Scotland, decisions on how best to deliver services to local communities are ultimately for integration authorities and locally elected representatives to make.

While service delivery is ultimately a local responsibility, it is worth noting that the Scottish Government is taking action to reduce waiting times on a national level. On 31 March 2025 we published the NHS Scotland Operational Improvement Plan which sets out a clear plan to reduce waiting times and delayed discharges.

The Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework, which is scheduled to be published in June 2025, will also focus on the key reform areas that will drive our model of service to be more preventative, to find risk factors sooner and raise the level of early intervention and proactive care.

The information requested is not held centrally for all years requested.

However, weekly data on the number of people waiting for a social care assessment is published monthly by Public Health Scotland at Health and Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs) level. The dashboard can be accessed via the following link:

People requiring a Social Care assessment and Care at Home services

Data is available from 24 October 2022 onwards. Comparisons over time should be made with caution due to a change in definitions implemented in January 2024.

Comparison of figures between HSCPs should also be made with caution and should be done in conjunction with the data quality notes available in the dashboard.

Not all Partnerships were able to provide all data. The data quality section of the dashboard provides more information on each of the partnerships' ability to provide data.

The Scottish Government does not hold data which would answer this question.

However, data up to 2022/23 on Social Care eligibility and waiting times is publicly available at Local Authority level via the following weblink:

Social care: eligibility criteria and waiting times Scotland 2022-2023 - gov.scot

Data showing the time waited between referral first contact and completion of a community care assessment service in the final quarter of each financial year can be found in the ‘waiting times new clients’ tab of the Excel workbook which accompanies the publication.

Data showing the time waited between completion of a community care assessment and delivery of a new personal care service in the final quarter of each financial year can be found in the ‘Waiting times new personal care clients’ tab of the Excel workbook which accompanies the publication.

However there are a number of caveats with these data:

• The data return template sent to LAs is aggregate, and only grouped time periods are collected. Therefore it is not possible to calculate an average waiting time - only a distribution of time periods is possible.
• Many local authorities have reported difficulty in providing the information asked for in this data collection and therefore not all data is available for every year.
• Due to the gaps in the Local Authority level data, we cannot effectively aggregate to Health Board. Completeness levels for each LA can be found within the ‘Data completeness’ tab of the Excel workbook which accompanies the publication.

Due to the issues faced in collecting this data from LAs and due to the lack of completeness, this data collection has been paused while we explore alternative methods of obtaining higher quality information on eligibility criteria and the length of time people wait for services. Therefore the most recent data available is for
2022-23.

Data on the total number of care hours planned for delivery is not held centrally.

Data on the number of hours of care at home funded by Health and Social Care Partnerships in Scotland is published annually by Public Health Scotland and can be found via the dashboard on following weblink:

Care at Home Statistics for Scotland: Support and services funded by Health and Social Care Partnerships in Scotland 2023/2024 - Care at Home Statistics for Scotland - Publications - Public Health Scotland

Data are available for 2018-19 to 2023-24.

Data showing the number of hours for people assessed but yet to be delivered, and for number of additional hours of care to be delivered to those already receiving a care package is published by Public Health Scotland at local authority level. This can be found via the dashboard on following weblink:

Overview - People requiring a Social Care assessment and Care at Home services - Care at home - Social and community care - Healthcare system - Public Health Scotland

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-37715 on 28 May 2025. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.

A delayed discharge occurs when a hospital patient who is clinically ready for discharge from inpatient hospital care continues to occupy a hospital bed beyond the date they are ready for discharge. Information held nationally on delayed discharges can identify the number of people aged 18 and over who were delayed in their discharge from hospital.

People delayed due to a lack of available social care packages can be identified using Delay Reason code 25D – “Awaiting completion of arrangements - in order to live in their own home – awaiting social care support (non-availability of services)”.

Figures from Financial Year 2020-21 to 2024-25 (inclusive) are shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Number of people delayed due to Awaiting completion of arrangements in order to live in their own home, awaiting social care support (non-availability of services) in the financial Years 2020-21 to 2024-25 by Health Board.

I refer the member to the answer to the question S6W-37715 on 28 May 2025. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers

We know that some patients have waited too long for treatment but we are committed to ensuring patients receive the care they need as quickly as possible and across various specialities we will deliver over 150,000 extra appointments and procedures in the coming year. Surgical procedures, including cataract surgery are subject to the Treatment Time Guarantee.

Whilst PHS data can be used routinely to identify the specialty of treatment, data at a procedure level is unavailable. The records are designed to collect coded information on the procedure that is planned for the patient, however this information is often either incomplete, lacking in essential detail and/or its accuracy cannot be assured. In addition, the procedure(s) that was planned may not always reflect the procedure actually performed after the patient was admitted for treatment. The latter is not captured through the national datamart. Consequently, PHS is not currently able to report accurately on waiting times to this level of detail.

Work is ongoing to support local surgical teams to increase efficiency and consequently the number of patients that can be treated across the cataract surgical pathway, in line with the Royal College of Ophthalmologists’ guidelines.

The Scottish Government commissioned the Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD) to support an increase in surgical throughput across cataract only surgical sessions. CfSD’s clinically-led Cataract Specialty Delivery Groups (SDG) promote multidisciplinary team working, and supports local adoption of service improvement programmes.

This short life working group has supported several new and innovative pathway developments, some of which are now being successfully scaled up in a number of sites across hospital eye services, including: high volume cataract surgery in ring-fenced sessions, and delivering one cataract every 30 mins, as per Royal College of Ophthalmologists’ guidelines. In tandem with this, The National Eyecare Workstream is undertaking clinically led peer reviews which supports new and efficient ways of working and shares best practices across the country across a number of ocular sub-specialties, including cataracts.