Public Health Scotland

Scotland’s lead national agency for improving and protecting the health and wellbeing of all of Scotland’s people.

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Annual Outpatient Activity Edit

Patients who require the medical opinion of a specialist clinician may be referred to an outpatient clinic for treatment or investigation. An outpatient is a patient who attends (outpatient attendance) a consultant or other medical clinic, or has an arranged meeting with a consultant or a senior member of their team outwith a clinic session. Outpatients are not admitted to a hospital and do not use a hospital bed.\r\n\r\nOutpatient attendances can be categorised as new or follow-up (return) attendances. Information on return appointments is only available for datasets that report on NHS Board of Treatment. Files reporting on the residency of patients only contain data for new outpatients as the ISD(S)1 data source for return outpatients does not contain residence information. ISD(S)1 also does not record information on the deprivation, age or sex of patients.\r\n\r\nA variety of operations are carried out in NHSScotland and, increasingly, less complex procedures are undertaken in an outpatient setting. For further information on these procedures, see the Operations/Procedures section of the Public Health Scotland website.\r\n\r\nFurther information on hospital activity can be found in the recent annual publication. \r\n\r\nThe date of the next release can be found on our list of forthcoming publications https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/forthcoming-publications/

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Additional Info

License	UK Open Government Licence v3.0
Category	Business and Economy, Health and Social Care
Maintainer	Public Health Scotland
Date Created	2020-09-24
Date Updated	2024-09-24
Original dataset link	https://www.opendata.nhs.scot/dataset/annual-outpatient-activity