Free Personal and Nursing Care: Methodology and background information, 2023-24

Scottish Government Quarterly Monitoring Return

This has also been known as the Community Care Quarterly Key Monitoring Return.

Since July 2002, the Scottish Executive – followed by the Scottish Government – has collected information on the number of self-funding care home residents receiving Free Personal Care (FPC) and Free Nursing Care (FNC) payments, and the number of people receiving Free Personal Care (FPC) services at home as part of their Care at Home package, under the Community Care and Health (Scotland) Act 2002.

From 2013-14 to 2020-21 this data collection was conducted during the final quarter of the year only. This means that prior to 2021-22, the values show a snapshot of the year at the end of Quarter 4, rather than the average across the year. Annual values for the number of clients, and the number of hours of care represent a snapshot at the end of Quarter 4.

From 2021-22 onwards, data has been published for all four quarters within the accompanying tables. This has always been the case for data for those aged 65 and over, but values for those aged 18 to 64 are now also presented in this way.

In 2019, this survey was updated to collect information on under 65s receiving FPC following the extension of the policy to people of all ages who are eligible. This data was first published in a separate report (Extension Of Free Personal Care To People Under The Age Of 65, Scotland, 2020-21), but since 2021-22, has been included in the same publication as the data on those aged 65 and over.

More details on the variables collected are in Appendix 2: Collected and Calculated Variables.

A Quarterly Monitoring Return spreadsheet for 2023-24 data was emailed to relevant contacts at all local authorities in October 2023. Local authorities returned completed versions to the Scottish Government between October 2023 and June 2024.

Other data sources

The Quarterly Monitoring Return was the only data source used in the 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 publications. However, Local Financial Return (LFR) 03 was used to provide financial data for the 2020-21 publication and in previous years.

Prior to 2017-18, data on Care at Home was collected and published by the Scottish Government via the Social Care Survey.

For more details of data sources used in previous years’ FPNC publications, please refer to past publications themselves, available via the Free Personal and Nursing Care collection.