The following disclosure control methods have been applied to the data, in order to protect confidentiality: ISD protocol on Statistical Disclosure Protocol and the Scottish Government’s privacy notice.

The Care Home Census is a National Statistics publication. National Statistics status means that the official statistics meet the highest standards of trustworthiness, quality and public value. They comply with the Code of Practice for statistics and are awarded National Statistics status following an assessment by the UK Statistics Authority’s regulatory arm. The Authority considers whether the statistics meet the highest standards of Code compliance, including the value they add to public decisions and debate.

Find out more about the Code of Practice

Find out more about National Statistics

The Care Inspectorate's eForms system automatically validates some of the data submitted by care homes. E.g. a care home cannot submit data unless the number of residents at the start of the financial year equals the number of residents at the end of the financial year plus the number of admissions during the financial year, minus the number of deaths and discharges during the financial year. However there are known issues with the data, e.g. discharge dates are not always recorded (in part 2 of the census which asks for data at individual long stay resident level), and so some deceased residents and some residents who were discharged alive, are incorrectly included. This was discovered for the first time when ISD CHI-seeded the 2017 care home census individual level long stay resident records then matched them to death dates from National Records Scotland.

These statistics are also available for download from the NHS Scotland Open Data portal, along with other health and care data.

Please see the Care Home Census data supplier guidance letter for definitions of terms used in the Care Home Census.

Long Stay Residents are those whose intention when admitted to an adult care home was to stay there for more than six weeks, regardless of how long they actually stay. Residents whose intention when admitted to an adult care home was to stay there for fewer than six weeks are counted as Short Stay Residents, and the reason for the short stay was not for respite relief. If a resident stays for longer than 6 weeks they are counted as a long stay resident instead. Residents who stay in an adult care home to provide respite or holiday relief to them and/or their carer are Respite Residents. A period of respite is normally one night or one weekend or a few weeks at most.

The statistics are used by the Scottish Government, local authorities, private and voluntary service providers, academics and members of the public to get a clear picture of care home provision across Scotland and to plan the provision of care home places in the future.

A short summary report is available on the uses of the Care Home Census data.

This dataset is updated annually.

There are no revisions to this publication.