Mental Health Inpatient Census
Annual publication of data collected in the Inpatient Census: covering patients in mental health, addiction and learning disability beds who are funded by NHS Scotland at a point in time, together with patients receiving Hospital Based Complex Clinical Care (HBCCC).
Introduction
The 2025 Mental Health Inpatient Census was carried out as at 23:59 on the 9 April 2025 by NHS Boards across Scotland. The census has three parts:
- Part 1: Mental Health and Learning Disability Inpatient Bed Census
- Part 2: Outwith NHS Scotland Placements
- Part 3: Hospital Based Complex Clinical Care and Long Stay
Parts 1 and 2 were carried out for the first time in October 2014, and repeated again each March from 2016 to present. In March 2016, the census was expanded to include a section on patients receiving Hospital Based Complex Clinical Care (HBCCC) and Long Stay patients. The census was paused in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19.
Revision of delayed discharge data
The delayed discharge analysis for the 2024 census was held back to ensure the data was accurate. In the course of this, it was discovered that some delayed discharge data for the 2023 census was also inaccurate. Both have now been revised.
Part 1 of the Mental Health Inpatient Census 2022 and archived censuses
During 2023, work to improve the coding procedures used in creating the MHIC data sets revealed that a small number of health boards provided incomplete data for the 2022 census. The same issue also occurred in the 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2019 censuses. The data for 2018 was unaffected, although the report contains data from previous census years.
Whilst the impact of the missing data was small at the national reporting level, the 2022 census data has been revised.
The older censuses have not been updated, but have been moved to the archive.
Further details are available in the Methodology section of the Inpatient Census 2023: parts one and two.
2024
2023
2022
Other health and social care publications
For other publications relating to health and social care, please see the health and social care analysis page of our website.
Contact
Enquiries relating to the Inpatient Census should be sent to: HSCAnalysishub@gov.scot
All other enquiries should be directed to the Scottish Government’s central enquiry unit:
Email: ceu@gov.scot
Tel: 0300 244 4000
Text Relay Service: 18001+ 0300 244 4000 (service for the hard of hearing)
Scottish Government
St. Andrew's House
Regent Road
Edinburgh
EH1 3DG