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Question reference: S6W-39813

Asked by: Tim Eagle, MSP for Highlands and Islands, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 07 August 2025
Current Status: Answered by Neil Gray on 22 August 2025

To ask the Scottish Government how many Significant Adverse Event Reviews have been commissioned for a Category I adverse event in each year since 2021, broken down by NHS board.

The data requested is gathered by Healthcare Improvement Scotland and is provided in the following table.

Category 1 SAERs commissioned from Jan 2021 - Jun 2025
Board	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025
NHS 24	< 5	8	< 5	10	< 5
NHS Ayrshire & Arran	46	49	46	56	34
NHS Borders	12	18	10	15	12
NHS Dumfries & Galloway	47	47	40	42	25
NHS Fife	46	68	66	59	33
NHS Forth Valley	18	15	28	19	12
NHS Grampian	23	21	21	31	20
NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde	244	272	292	317	117
NHS Highland	20	22	26	29	20
NHS Lanarkshire	50	84	107	99	64
NHS Lothian	71	91	80	94	20
NHS National Waiting Times Centre	27	18	21	12	< 5
NHS Orkney	< 5	6	8	< 5	< 5
NHS Shetland	< 5 in each year
NHS Tayside	24	22	36	40	16
NHS Western Isles	< 5 in each year
Scottish Ambulance Service	62	46	64	22	7
State Hospital	< 5 in each year
Total	700	788	852	857	389

Notes

1.The data is sourced from Healthcare Improvement Scotland’s (HIS) Significant Adverse Event Review National Notification System.

2.The data provided for 2025 is for the period from January to June 2025 only.

3.Cases where the volume is less than 5 are withheld to comply with HIS' disclosure control protocols.

4.HIS published the revised ‘Learning from adverse events through reporting and review: A national framework for Scotland’ in February 2025. Each NHS board is responsible for applying the National Framework in the context of its own local incident reporting systems and governance processes. Therefore, there remains some variation in how the National Framework is applied in practice and it is not possible to compare data on a like-for-like basis across NHS boards.

5.The notification data refers to the commissioning of SAERs for category 1 events, and not the total number of category 1 events.