Respite Care Scotland, 2013

1. Introduction

This Statistics Release presents information on respite care services provided or purchased by Local Authorities in Scotland. Respite Care is a service intended to benefit a carer and the person he or she cares for by providing a short break from caring tasks.

In this publication, the information has been presented and converted into respite weeks to allow presentation of an estimate of the total number of respite weeks provided each year in Scotland. In order to calculate this, seven respite nights equal one respite week and 52.5 hours equal one respite week.

This release presents the results for the last six years to give a picture of:

• The total number of respite weeks provided by each Local Authority in Scotland
• The amount of daytime and overnight respite provided
• The amount of respite provision by age group

Due to changes in methodology of data collection, figures are not directly comparable across all years. Figure 1 has estimated a trend in overnight and daytime respite weeks in Scotland, which has been scaled to take the changes in methodology into account (this is explained in more detail in Section 4 of this report). There were 205,810 overnight and daytime respite weeks provided in Scotland in 2012/13, which is estimated to be a real terms increase of 12,650 respite weeks (7.3%) on 2007/08. There has also been an increase in respite weeks each year since 2007/08.

Figure 1 : Overnight and Daytime respite weeks, percentage increases since 2007/08

Source: Audit Scotland SPI data 2007/08-2008/09, Scottish Government 2009/10-2012/13.