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Palliative and End of Life Care

This data provides information in support of the Scottish Government’s Strategic Framework for Action on Palliative and End of Life Care which has one of its commitments to “support improvements in the collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of data and evidence relating to needs, provision, activity, indicators and outcomes in respect of palliative and end of life care”.

The percentage of time in the last 6 months of life spent at home or in a community setting provides a high level indication of progress in implementation of the strategic framework for action. This is inferred by measuring the amount of time spent in a hospital setting during the last months of life (using hospital admissions data) and from this estimating the time spent at home or in a community setting.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Source SMR01 – Acute Inpatient and Day Case/SMR01 Geriatric Long Stay, SMR04 – Mental Health Inpatient and Day Case, National Records of Scotland (NRS) deaths data
Author PHS Health and Social Care team
Maintainer PHS Open Data team
Last Updated October 8, 2024, 13:41 (BST)
Created November 26, 2019, 15:06 (GMT)
Contact Address Public Health Scotland, Gyle Square, 1 South Gyle Crescent, Edinburgh, EH12 9EB
Subject Health and Social Care
Frequency Annual
Time frame of data and timeliness Data is usually released in the month after Publication data extraction.
Coverage All deaths in Scotland since Financial Year 2014/15.
Completeness https://www.opendata.nhs.scot/dataset/palliative-and-end-of-life-care
Accuracy Standard validation processes are followed for SMR01 and SMR04.
Continuity of data Data is continously reported since the Financial Year 2014/15.
Concepts and definitions Deaths due to an external cause are excluded; these are identified by ICD-10 code V01 - Y84. Deaths due to falls (ICD-10 codes W00-W19) are included.
Disclosure The PHS Statistical Disclosure Protocol is followed.
Revision statement All data are revised annually to reflect any changes to analysis and to ensure the most complete information is presented. Data for the most recent financial year (including NRS data for 2024) are provisional and may be subject to change in forthcoming releases. Minor revisions of this nature are often due to incomplete data returns at the time of previous publication. There has also been a small correction made to the methodology where length of stay was previously over counted due to overlapping SMR01 and SMR04 stays. This affected a small proportion of activities and has had little impact on the figures released. There has been a change to the age bands from Financial Year 2014/15 where the age group 0-54 has been split into 0-17, 18-44 and 45-54.
Official statistics designation Official Statistics
Relevance and key uses of the statistics Making information publicly available; Allowing assessment of implementation/impact of policies or targets such as the Strategic Framework for Palliative and End of Life Care
Format CSV
Language English
Links

All publications and supporting material to this topic area can be found on the PHS Scotland End of Life Care Website. Further information on end of life care can be found in the annual publication. The date of the next release can be found on our list of forthcoming publications.