Introduction

The Scottish Government’s Health and Care Experience (HACE) survey asks about people’s experiences of:

• accessing and using their general practice and out of hours services
• aspects of care and support provided by local authorities and other organisations
• caring responsibilities and related support.

It is an online and postal survey sent to a random sample of people registered with a general practice in Scotland. The survey, successor to the GP and Local NHS Services Patient Experience Survey, has been run every two years since 2009.

Following the publication of the national results of the most recent HACE survey national results (2023-24), this report provides further analysis of the results of some of the questions related to care.

Areas of particular interest are how the experiences of people receiving care, and those providing care, has changed over recent years; and further analysis of the reason(s) for unmet need.

Presentation of data

The figures presented in this report are rounded to the nearest whole number (integer). The results to 2 decimal places are available in the supplementary tables, along with the 95% confidence intervals for each percentage estimate. The percentage point differences presented in this report have been calculated from the original unrounded numbers, so may be different from what would be calculated using the rounded figures presented in this report.

All changes over time that are discussed in this report are statistically significant at the ninety-five per cent level.

Experiences of carers

This report presents a time series of answers to some of the questions from 2015-16 to 2023-24 around caring responsibilities, and the experiences of people who said they provided care to others.

New analysis on people’s experiences of receiving care

This report also presents the results of new analysis of some of the questions around people’s experiences of receiving care, from 2015-16 to 2023-24. The results presented here are not comparable to the figures published in the HACE national reports for those years, because they refer to the experiences of slightly different groups of people.

Changes to some of the early questions about who said they had received care, in the 2021-22 and 2023-24 HACE surveys, have changed the group of people answering subsequent questions about their experiences of care. For this report, we wanted to be able to see how people’s experiences of care had changed over time, by comparing the responses of equivalent groups of people each year. We therefore filtered the data from each year of the survey, so that we were comparing responses from equivalent groups of people in each year.

We recommend you use the figures in the main HACE national reports for quoting figures from individual survey years, and any time series referring to years before 2015-16. And that you use the figures in this report to understand the most recent analysis of changes in people’s experiences over time, between 2015-16 and 2023-24.

There are more details of how we did the filtering, and which questions we analysed, in the Data and Methodology section.

Unmet need in 2023-24

Finally, this analysis also presents an alternative and more detailed analysis of Table 3 from the main HACE 2023-24 national results, which formed the main findings for unmet and under-met need for help, care and support for everyday living. The table reported on which options respondents chose to describe their situation, if they felt that they weren’t receiving all the help and care services they felt they needed.

Two changes have been made to the way this table is constructed to provide estimates solely for the population who have indicated an unmet need – i.e. reported reasons that they are not receiving all the help and care services that they feel they need. First, we removed those who selected “not applicable” from the sample for this table. Second, we manually recoded the selection of the box “other” for the respondents who left and open text response to this question, based on whether this response indicated an unmet need. If no unmet need was indicated by the comment – for example, respondents left a positive comment regarding help and care they received, or stated they had no need for support – the “other” box was deselected. Where an unmet need was indicated the “other” box was selected/ confirmed. More details on the open text analysis can be found in the data and methodology section.

You should use the results presented in this report to describe people’s reasons why they say they are not receiving all the help or care services that they feel they need. The exception is if you want to report on the percentage of respondents who selected “not applicable” when asked about their unmet care needs. For that percentage, you should use the figure presented in the HACE 2023-24 national report.  

An Official Statistics publication for Scotland

These statistics are official statistics. Official statistics are statistics that are produced by crown bodies, those acting on behalf of crown bodies, or those specified in statutory orders, as defined in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.

Scottish Government statistics are regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to.

More information about Scottish Government statistics is available on the Scottish Government website.