Scottish Health Survey: content review outcomes report

Cardiovascular disease and use of services

During the review process we received support for the cardiovascular disease and use of services module. SG Clinical Priorities team supported the health survey team’s suggestion that we remove duplicate questions that ask about conditions as respondents are then asked about doctor-diagnosed conditions. The latter provides more robust figures which are used in SHeS analysis and removing the duplicate questions will free up some much needed space in the survey. We, therefore, removed the duplicate questions from 2024 and only ask about doctor-diagnosed conditions. We have changed the terminology to ask about ‘doctor or other healthcare professional’ to reflect that more specialists can diagnose illnesses.

E.g. we previously asked:

[EverBp] CVD1

Do you have, or have you ever had high blood pressure (sometimes called hypertension)?

1          Yes

2          No

IF Everbp = Yes THEN [DocNurBp] DocBP

You mentioned that you have had high blood pressure. Were you told by a doctor or nurse that you had high blood pressure?

1          Yes

2          No

We now only ask:

BP1

Have you ever been told by a doctor or other healthcare professional that you have high blood pressure?

1          Yes

2          No

Based on a request from the SG Clinical Priorities team we also included a question asking about doctor or healthcare professional diagnosis of Transient Ischaemic Attack (TIA), in addition to the questions about stroke that we already ask.

Based on a request from the SG Clinical Priorities team, we also updated the diabetes insulin question to include insulin pumps to determine the mechanism people use to deliver insulin.

Other requests, including the inclusion of questions about the impact of each individual condition, and adding additional heart condition questions were not possible due to the number of additional questions this would require and the lack of available space in the survey to do so. Respondents are asked about ‘other heart trouble’ and verbatim responses are recorded about the conditions so it may be possible to extract meaningful data on the requested individual heart conditions from this existing question.

Similarly, a request to add a question about quality of care for individuals who have received treatment for any of the conditions asked about was not possible due to space, and data on this is already available from the Care and Experience Survey.

For the cardiovascular disease and use of services module with the updated questions see annex 5.