Health and Social Care Statistics: code of practice compliance
Code of practice compliance information for Health and Social Care Statistics.
Health and Social Care Statistics Public Involvement and Engagement Strategy
The Code of Practice for Statistics requires that Statistics Producers put users at the centre of decision making about the statistics, listening and responding to feedback, and be transparent about statistical planning
We are keen to further our stakeholder engagement to ensure our analytical outputs are having maximum impact.
We will use the gov.scot website and Statistics blog to provide updates on developments.
Statistical Plans
Publishing a statistics plan demonstrates openness and transparency about progress toward priorities and enables users and stakeholders to help shape future work. We have published our Health and Social Care Statistics Plan 2026-2027.
Consultations
Consultations on the content of the Scottish Health Survey are conducted in advance of procurement of the survey contract. The last consultation informed the content of the survey from 2024 onwards.
The consultation was widely advertised with users via targeted sessions and ScotStat notifications.
A consultation to gather views of data providers and users of the Mental Health Inpatient Census is in the initial planning stages.
Updates on developments
We will use the gov.scot website and Statistics blog and ScotStat to provide updates on statistical developments.
Improvement work on the Carers Census commenced in Spring 2026, engaging with stakeholders and working with Social Care Data and Intelligence Programme Board (SCDIPB) and the Right to Breaks Steering Group to improve the accuracy and utility of the collection.
User Groups
The Scottish Health Survey Project Board plays an important role in the governance of the survey. The board includes policy users and representatives from key user organisations Scottish Health Survey Project Board: membership and overview - gov.scot.
A blog was released on 18 February 2026 outlining the transformation of social care data and the SCDIPB Comms and Engagement subgroup sent out its first newsletter on 25 March outlining plans for the social care data landscape. A series of quarterly Adult Social Care Data Network meetings have been set up throughout 2026-2027, with the first session on 20 May 2026.
The Care Home Data Working Group has been established to take forward the recommendations from the multi‑agency Care Home Data Review. It brings together representatives from across the care home sector, including care home managers, representative bodies, and local and national organisations and government. Having a wide range of members also helps maintain strong links with existing user networks.
User Feedback
We welcome feedback on the presentation and communication of our statistics as we look to introduce improvements consistently across publications.
If you would like to get in touch to provide feedback on the statistical outputs we produce, please contact: HSCAnalysisHub@gov.scot
Contact details for particular outputs include:
- Scottish Health Survey: ScottishHealthSurvey@gov.scot
- Care experience surveys: patientexperience@gov.scot
- Adult Social Care: swstat@gov.scot
We also welcome your views on how best we can communicate specific developments with users as the year progresses.
Official Statistics in Development
Official statistics in development are official statistics that are undergoing a development; they may be new or existing statistics, and will be tested with users, in line with the standards of trustworthiness, quality, and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics.
Where appropriate, we release official statistics in development to recognise fresh needs for information among users, to review existing statistics to ensure that they continue to meet the needs of users, and to enable users to be involved in the testing of the statistics. A recent example is: Health and Care Experience Survey 2023/24: Analysis of reported unmet care needs among people aged 65+.
Another example is Adult Support and Protection. This releases data from the national minimum dataset and is an example of where data is in development but some sections have been assessed as robust enough to release publicly. Regular engagement with stakeholders is ongoing to consider approaches to improving data quality. For example, consideration is being given to how to improve completeness levels of ethnicity data. Data is produced at a national level but it is hoped that in time, data will be robust enough to publish at HSCP level.