Main points

Outpatients

Image of a line chart showing a time trend for outpatient attendances for quarters ending December 2019 to December 2024 is shown. The line shows a sharp drop at the beginning of the covid pandemic (quarter ending June 2020), followed by an increase each quarter until June 2021, with levels beyond this remaining fairly constant but still below pre-pandemic levels. In the most recent quarter, outpatient attendances in NHSScotland have decreased by 1% compared to quarter ending December 2023.

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Outpatient attendances in NHSScotland, for quarters ending December 2019 to December 2024^p

p - provisional.

There were just over one million (1,006,530) outpatient attendances between 1 October and 31 December 2024 – a 1% decrease compared to the same quarter in the previous year, and an 8% decrease compared to the same quarter in 2019 (pre-pandemic). Of these, 32% (321,210 attendances) were new cases. The remaining 68% (685,320 attendances) were patients returning for follow-up appointments. During the same period, 8.2% (90,435) of all outpatient appointments were not kept without prior notification by the patient ('Did Not Attends').

Inpatients and day cases

There were 254,024 hospital admissions between 1 October and 31 December 2024 – a 1% decrease compared to the same quarter in the previous year, and an 8% decrease compared to the same quarter in 2019 (pre-pandemic). Of these, 45% (115,476) were emergency inpatient admissions, 11% (28,181) elective (planned) inpatient admissions, and 43% (108,901) day cases. The average length of stay for inpatients was 7.7 days: 3.2 days for elective inpatients and 8.7 days for emergency inpatients.

Beds

There were on average 13,614 available staffed beds per day for all acute specialties in the quarter ending 31 December 2024 – a 1.3% decrease compared to the same quarter in the previous year. An available staffed bed is a bed which is resourced for inpatient or day case care. Of these, 9,737 (72%) were for medical specialties and 3,877 (28%) were for surgical specialties. For all acute specialties in the quarter ending 31 December 2024, the percentage occupancy was 88.8%, a 1.6 percentage point increase compared to the same quarter in the previous year. The percentage occupancy is the percentage of available staffed beds that were occupied on average by inpatients during the period.

Data quality

There are known issues with the quality of data presented such as inpatient and day case completeness. For more information, please see the Data quality and Trend data sections. Please note that the focus is on new and outstanding data issues. Resolved issues are listed in previous publication releases.

Further information

This release includes the NHS Fife, NHS Forth Valley, NHS Golden Jubilee (GJ) and NHS Highland National Treatment Centre (NTC) (external website) locations. As not all NTCs have a unique location code, and may be an expansion of an existing location, it is not currently possible to accurately differentiate between NTC activity and additional activity carried out within an NHS Board. Therefore, NTC figures reported may not be reflective of all NTC activity.

The data for the most recent quarter are provisional. Provisional data are subject to change in future publications, as submissions may be updated to reflect a more accurate and complete set of data from NHS Boards.

The volume of hospital activity and trends observed continue to be impacted post-pandemic and during the recovery phase. For example, inpatient and day case activity and outpatient activity have both reduced by 8% when comparing October to December 2024 to the same quarter of 2019 (pre-pandemic). However, activity levels have generally been recovering from July 2020 onwards but are still not up to pre-pandemic levels.

This release does not include specific COVID-19 information: visit our COVID-19 webpages for PHS COVID-19 information or the Scottish Government website (external website) for information on COVID-19 in Scotland.

Disclosure control methods have been applied to the data to protect patient confidentiality: therefore, some figures on total counts may not be additive.

Further information on this quarterly publication is available on these web pages. Data from this publication are available to download from the Data files and Data explorer sections of our website and from the Scottish Health and Social Care Open Data platform (external website). Annual data are available from the annual publication page on our website.

Publications released before May 2020 may be found on the Data and Intelligence website. Background information on hospital care can be found in the Hospital Care topic area.

The next release of this quarterly acute hospital activity & NHS beds publication will be in November 2025.

Publication summary