FOI 25-145 Paramedic Leavers and Sick Leave Figures
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 25-145 Paramedic Leavers and Sick Leave Figures
- Request Date
- 16 Apr 2025
- Response Date
- 16 May 2025
- Information Requested
- How many physical assaults have there been on paramedics by members of the public in the past ten years? - Please break down year by year. Please breakdown the types of assaults faced by paramedics (punching, spitting etc).
- How many paramedics have resigned from your service each year over the past ten years?
- How many paramedics have left the force (not including retirements) each year over the past ten years.
- What was the average length of service for paramedics leaving the service each year of the past ten years.
- How many paramedics have taken leave citing PTSD or any other mental health conditions each year over the past ten years.
- Response
The Service has a range of measures in place to help protect staff. Known or reported areas where staff have previously faced violence or threatening behaviour are taken into consideration and communicated to attending crews. Scottish Ambulance Service staff are trained in managing aggression and assessing risk, enabling them to better judge when they need to wait for support from the Police or request additional service support.
The wellbeing of our hardworking staff is a key priority for the Service, and we have put additional measures in place and increased support over the last year in line with our Health and Wellbeing Strategy. We have also been working in partnership with key hospital sites to reduce delays in patient handover.
We are thankful to all our staff, who have been doing an incredible job in very difficult circumstances. In addition, over the last 3 years, we’ve recruited a record 1,388 staff, introduced 52 additional ambulances, aligned shift patterns to meet patient demand and expanded into 10 new locations as part of our Demand and Capacity Programme.
Please see the attached data sheet detailing the information you have requested.
Tab 1 - the number of physical assaults that have been carried out by members of the public on Paramedics in the past ten years.
Tab 2 – How many Paramedics have left the service, excluding any retirals over the past 10 years. This tab also provides the total number of paramedics that have resigned each year and the average length of service for the Paramedic leavers provided in years.
It is important to note, we have also excluded ill-health retirals from these figures.
Tab 3 – How many Paramedics have been absent from work with reasons of stress/anxiety/depression from 2019-2024. The Scottish Ambulance Service does not have the dataset to report on PTSD related absences, however, we have provided the paramedic absences with the reason of Stress/Anxiety/Depression; these figures are found on the second tab on the attached data sheet.
The data provided only goes as far back as 2019, information held before this is held on a legacy system that cannot be retrieved. It is for this reason I have applied section 17 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002 to the information from 2015-2018, as information not held.
IMPORTANT INFORMTION TO CONSIDER WHEN INTERPRETING THIS DATA
For the Paramedic sickness on Tab 3
- An employee may be counted in more than one year. For example: if employee is absent from January 2019 to 31 May 2020, they will be counted in the figures for 2019/20 and 2020/21.
B. An employee is counted in a year if they had an absence due to anxiety, stress or depression of any length of time in that year.
C. If an employee moved job role or area within a financial year and were absent in both roles or areas they will be counted across each of these.
D. We have split the information into job roles and areas. Due to small numbers, we are unable to break this down further and show the number of employees by both factors combined.
For the given data, you will see that some of the figures are shown as, five or less than five, please note that this figure has been suppressed because the statistical value is less than five. The Scottish Ambulance service has a duty, under the Data Protection Act to avoid directly or indirectly revealing any personal details. It is therefore widely understood that provision of statistics on small numbers, five or less are statistically suppressed upon disclosure.
- An employee may be counted in more than one year. For example: if employee is absent from January 2019 to 31 May 2020, they will be counted in the figures for 2019/20 and 2020/21.
- Response Documents
