Social Care Eligibility Criteria And Waiting Times, Scotland, 2020-21

1. Data gaps and future plans

This is the first report produced to aid the understanding of the annually published data tables for Eligibility Criteria and Waiting Times. Data up to 2018 were available in Excel table format only, and data from 2019 to 2021 are included in this release.

The data submitted on Eligibility Criteria and Waiting Times has significant gaps, as many local authorities have not been able to submit the data. As such, there is no Scotland-level trend available, but we report on the local authorities that have responded to each data table within the collection every year, from 2012 to 2021.

For further details on specific local authorities, please see the accompanying dataset.

Many Local Authorities have reported difficulty in providing the information asked for in this data collection, which has had a significant impact on the robustness of the information available for analysis. We have been working with Public Health Scotland (PHS) to discuss the future of this data and are developing plans to capture waiting times data within existing Social Care collections returned to PHS, making it more straightforward for partnerships to provide data, and in turn resulting in more complete and consistent data in the future. This will therefore be the penultimate release of this data by Scottish Government using the existing collection format. If you have any queries or concerns about this proposed change, please contact us at swstat@gov.scot.