Improving health and social care service resilience over public holidays: data analysis

4 Sources of national information

The information presented in this supplementary report has been sourced from the following national datasets held by ISD:

4.1 The Unscheduled Care Datamart ( UCD) links patients’ data to show the pathway they have taken through the different emergency and urgent care services this includes;

• NHS 24 calls
• Primary Care Out of Hours Services contacts
• Scottish Ambulance Service incidents
• Accident & Emergency attendances
• Acute Emergency Inpatients admissions (including mental health admissions)
• Deaths

The UCD has been used in this report as the main source of information for the above services.

4.2 General/Acute Inpatient and Day Case record – SMR01, is an episode-based patient record relating to all inpatients and day cases discharged from non-obstetric and non-psychiatric specialties.

4.3 Prescribing - ISD has held data on medicines prescribed within NHS Scotland for several decades. These data are generated as part of prescription processing for the payment of dispensing contractors by the Practitioner Services in NHS National Services Scotland (now part of Practitioner and Counter Fraud Services, P&CFS). We currently have data on over one billion prescriptions, which we make available to customers through routine reporting, bespoke analysis and online tools. You can find out more information here.

4.4 District Nursing – person based records available from district nurses began collection nationally in 2015. Therefore, this is still a relatively new dataset and work is ongoing to improve the completeness. More information can be found here.

4.5 Care Homes

Information on residents in Scotland’s care homes is available from two different sources nationally. The Scottish Care Home Census ( SCHC) is collected on an annual basis and is intended to cover all adult care home establishments that are registered with the Care Inspectorate. Information derived from the SCHC is used in this report.

A second source of information on care home residents funded by local authorities is part of the Source Social Care Dataset, collected by ISD. At present only a small sample of local authorities provide this information although as noted in the main report it is planned that this will change in future.

4.6 Home Care packages

Data on Home Care packages are available from the SOURCE social care data collection which began receiving data nationally in 2015. Information on the dataset, definitions and guidance can be found here. Please note, this collection is currently under review and following consultation is expected to develop further next year.