Social care - personal assistants: current data sources and future work

Next steps

An essential part of the PA Programme Board’s commitment to workforce planning is to first estimate the current number of PAs in Scotland as accurately as possible. The Scotland Excel report on the number of PAs who received the COVID-19 ‘Thank you payments’ has been used as a minimum known number of PAs in Scotland (around 4,800 people); however, a more robust estimate is required for workforce planning.

As a part of the workforce planning, this report will be shared with the Data subgroup of the PA Programme Board and other relevant organisations and will be used as the basis for future work.

Work is under way to improve the accuracy of existing data sources and consider additional data sources. There is also a need to demonstrate the potential validity and generalisability of the method used by SfC in England for the PA workforce across Scotland. This work includes:

• Development of membership data from 2024 as part of the creation of the PA national membership organisation and data collection by Disclosure Scotland following the introduction of PA as a regulated role from 2025.
• Explore potential of regular sample surveys with a view to identifying sources which align with and complement existing data collection. We are in discussion with SDSS and SDS leads with a view to finding a way to independently verify the proportion of SDS option 1 recipients who are PA employers and the average number of PAs employed by PA employers.

Discussion will also be maintained with ILFS to ensure that their systems can capture the additional PA employers and PAs funded only via their fund.