FOI 25-201 Prison Overdose of Assault Incidents
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 25-201 Prison Overdose of Assault Incidents
- Request Date
- 09 May 2025
- Response Date
- 20 May 2025
- Information Requested
1) The number of times the Scottish Ambulance Service has been called to a Scottish Prison to deal with a case of a prisoner overdosing on a substance of any kind. Please provide this information for the financial years of 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24.
2) The number of times the Scottish Ambulance Service has been called to a Scottish Prison to attend to a prison officer or a prisoner who has been assaulted on the premises of a Scottish Prison.
If possible, please break down this information by the number of prisoners assaulted requiring an ambulance and number of prison officers assaulted requiring an ambulance. Please provide this information for the financial years of 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24.
- Response
Please see the attached data sheet detailing the total number of number of incidents attended with the chief complaint of either ‘Assaults’ or ‘Overdose/Poisoning’ for each of the years requested. The following postcodes have been used to provide the data - G33 2QX, DD2 5HL, DG2 9AX, EH11 3LN, FK10 3AD, AB42 2YY, PA16 9AJ, IV2 3HH, KA1 5AA, G20 9DR, G64 2QB, PH2 8AT, FK2 0AB, ML7 4LE, FK9 5NU, EH55 8QA, DD3 7TF.
This information has been provided over two tabs. The first tab details the total number of incidents attended with the chief complaint of ‘Assault’ or ‘Overdose/Poisoning’ for all of the postcodes above broken down by year.
The second tab details the total number of attended incidents with the chief complaint of either ‘Assault’ or ‘Overdose/poisoning’ broken down by postcode area. Under the Data Protection Act, the Scottish Ambulance Service had a duty of care to avoid directly or indirectly disclosing identifiable information. The numbers provided are too small to breakdown the incidents into financial years.
The information is not recorded in a way that would allow us to distinguish whether the assault was on a prisoner, prison officer or member of the public. It is for this reason we have applied section 17 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002, as information not held.
Where no information is given for a postcode, there are no incidents to report.
Important to Note When Interpreting the Data
The data provided is for ALL attended incidents at postcode level, not all incidents will have taken place within the prisons, it could be at a location near a prison but under the same postcode, it could be a different street or address.
The incidents provided may not relate to a prisoner or prison guard, it could relate to a member of the public either within or out with the prison.
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.
- Response Documents
