Social care: eligibility criteria and waiting times Scotland 2022-2023

Data sources

The Scottish Government Quarterly monitoring return was used to compile this Statistics release.

The National standard eligibility criteria and waiting times for personal and nursing care was introduced in 2009-10, and was initially developed for older people following the publication of Lord Sutherland’s review, and was extended to all adults with the extension of free personal and nursing care in April 2019. The national standard seeks to deliver the shared commitments agreed by Scottish Ministers and local authority elected members. Eligibility criteria and waiting times for new social care clients completing a community care assessment and new personal care clients is collected annually.

The eligibility criteria and waiting times collection, although collected annually, is part of the longer running (since July 2002) Scottish Government Quarterly Monitoring Return collection on the number of people receiving personal care services at home, the number of self-funders receiving Free Personal Care and Free Nursing Care payments.

The outputs from the data collection can be accessed via the Social Care Analysis page on the Scottish Government website.

All data in this publication is sourced from the Scottish Government Quarterly Monitoring Return.

In 2019, this data collection was updated to collect information on under 65s receiving Free Personal Care following the extension of the policy to people of all ages who are eligible.

Understanding the Statistics in this Report

Time period

All information in this Statistics Release is presented for the last quarter of each financial year - from 1 January to 31 March. Information is reported for a rolling ten-year period, which in the case of this release is from 2014 to 2023. However, as the extension of free personal care to under 65’s came into force in April 2019, data on 18 to 64 year olds is recorded from 2019 to 2023 only.

Eligibility Criteria

In general, care should be taken when comparing the data on ‘numbers’ and ‘proportions’ of people completing a community care assessment or beginning a new personal care service. The number/proportion of people recorded is collected for the last 3 months of the financial year and so represents the number of people completing assessments or receiving personal care service delivery from January to March, rather than for the whole financial year. This does not represent the number of people for the full 52 weeks of the year.

Similarly, for the majority of local authorities, only clients assessed as ‘critical’ or ‘substantial’ on the eligibility criteria are able to receive care, due to the limitation of financial resources preventing more people from being supported.

Waiting Times

As with the Eligibility Criteria data, the information provided for clients waiting times between first contact and completion of a community care assessment, and between completion of a community care assessment to delivery of new personal care service provides a snapshot at the end of the financial year.

The data on number of clients waiting times from completion of a community care assessment to delivery of new personal care service is also used to determine the total numbers of new clients.

Limitations of the data

Completeness of data returns is a major limitation of this dataset.

There are three tables in the data collection template:

• Table 1 of the collection return counts new clients, by age band, of the numbers of older people in each of the eligibility criteria categories following a completed community care assessment.
• Table 2 of the collection return provides the distribution of time intervals from first contact to completion of a community care assessment separately for each of the eligibility criteria categories, for new clients recorded in Table 1.
• Table 3 of the collection return provides the distribution of time intervals from completion of a community care assessment to delivery of a relevant personal care service with the start date in the reporting period, separately for clients in each of the age and eligibility criteria categories. Therefore Table 3 does not count the same cohort of people as Tables 1 and 2.

For all three tables in the return there has been a decline in the number of local authorities that have completed it over time. For tables 1 and 2, there has been a decline in completion from 29 local authorities in 2014, to 23 in 2020. However, this has risen again in 2022 and 2023 to 26 and 28 returns respectively. For Table 3 there is a decline in completion from 25 local authorities in 2014 to 23 in 2020, with a low of 22 local authorities in 2015 and 2016. Tables of data completeness by local authority for each table in the return are detailed in the accompanying dataset.

In addition to the declining numbers of local authorities completing the data return, the local authorities completing the return vary each year. Both of these factors prevents a Scotland level analysis for Eligibility Criteria or Waiting Times. Any trend data contained within this report is for indicative purposes only using the local authorities that have responded every year between 2014 and 2023 and does not represent a national-level trend. Due to the difficulty cited by local authorities in providing the data, we advise caution in drawing further conclusions from the dataset, as different methodologies and recording systems in local authorities have affected data quality and comparability.

Users are advised that trends in the report, or that may be extracted from the dataset, are not of sufficient quality or consistency to support detailed analysis or modelling.

Local authorities provided a range of reasons for this data being of difficulty to provide. These reasons vary by local authority, but include:

• data required for the return is held independently, and so multiple datasets (specifically for those receiving a service) are necessary to complete the return,
• data is not recorded in the correct format or cannot be differentiated e.g. between clients receiving personal and non-personal care services,
• updates to recording systems preventing data delivery,
• data is not held by the local authority for this request.
   

Additional data quality information

In preparation for this release, data management processes have been reviewed. This resulted in the correction of a small number of errors found in the historic data including:

• Missing data – some data which may have been returned too late for inclusion in the release and which would have been marked at [NR] at that time, were never subsequently revised. This affected three local authorities data for 2015 and 2016.
• Population rates – an incorrect calculation was found in the calculation of the 65+ mid year population estimates for data between 2014 and 2017 estimates. That has now been rectified but will have resulted in changes to some of the previously published rates.
• Mid-year Population estimates for 2022 and 2023 are not yet available and so 2021 has been used as a proxy for calculation of rates.
• For tables including clients aged 65+ totals only include local authorities for which data is available for all ten years in the time series. Therefore, local authorities included in the totals in this publication, may differ from those included in totals in the previous release.
• In the tables for those aged 18-64, totals include only those local authorities where data is available for all five years in the time series. Therefore, local authorities included in the totals in this publication, may differ from those included in totals in the previous release.