NHSScotland Workforce 31 March 2025
Quarter ending 31 March 2025
Official Statistics
Published: 03 June 2025
About this release
This release by NHS Education for Scotland (NES) provides phase one of the quarterly update, as at 31 March 2025. This includes the number of staff directly employed by NHS Scotland and the number of vacant posts there were for nursing and midwifery staff, allied health professions, and medical and dental consultants. When describing the size of a particular staff group figures are presented as headcount (actual number of staff).
Medical agency hours and expenditure data for the year ending 31 March 2025 are delayed. These data are sourced from NHS Scotland's Finance Platform and supplied by NHS National Services Scotland (NSS). A concern regarding the quality of these data was raised by an NHS Board during the Early Release for Quality Assurance period. We are working with NSS to understand and assess any issues. Once any issues have been resolved and the data are agreed, we will include these figures in the NHS Scotland workforce Official Statistics.
Key Points
Background
Information on staff directly employed is sourced from each NHS Board’s human resources and payroll systems. These are dynamic, operational systems and data can change over time. Work is undertaken with NHS Boards to improve data quality and previously published information may change from one publication to the next to reflect these improvements.
The GPs and Dentists work mainly as contractors and are not directly employed by NHS Scotland. However, some of these staff, GP and Dental trainees, and some qualified GPs and Dentists are employed by NHS Scotland and are included in the figures presented above. This means that combining the NHS Scotland Workforce above with the Primary Care workforce will double count staff included in both sections.
Further Information
The next scheduled quarterly release of this publication will be 2 September 2025.
Publications prior to 3 December 2019 can be accessed via the ISD Workforce publication page.
Pre-release access to this official statistics release was granted for a period of 5 working days prior
to the date set for its publication to those people whose organisations and job titles are
listed in the attached document.