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. Outpatient attendances can be categorised as new or follow-up (return) attendances. \r\n\r\nPlease note that there have been outpatient methodological changes for this publication. Previously, the ISD(S)1 outpatients data source was used for return outpatient activity due to poorer completeness for historical SMR00 return outpatients. SMR00 return outpatients data are now more complete meaning SMR00 data can be used for both new and return outpatients. As a result, figures from the Annual September 2025 publication onwards will not be directly comparable to previous publications. Please refer to the publication report and data issues and completeness document for further information: https://www.publichealthscotland.scot/publications/acute-hospital-activity-and-nhs-beds-information-annual/\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	Health and Social Care
Maintainer	Public Health Scotland
Date Created	2020-09-24
Date Updated	2025-10-02
Original dataset link	https://www.opendata.nhs.scot/dataset/annual-outpatient-activity