FOI 25-511 Staff Assaults
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 25-511 Staff Assaults
- Request Date
- 07 Nov 2025
- Response Date
- 26 Nov 2025
- Information Requested
Could I please request the following: From 2017 until present date, separated by year,
how many reports from staff have you received of staff experiencing sexual harassment and gender based violence in their job role. Separated by incidences perpetrated by staff and by patients/members of the public.
From the same dates. Separated by year. What is the cost of litigation against the ambulance service from staff due to experiences of gender based violence and sexual harassment within their job roles.
From the same dates. Separated by year. How many days have staff been absent from their job roles due to experiences of sexual harassment and gender based violence within their job role.
Could this information please be separated by sexual harassment and gender based violence.
- 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.
Important to note – Between 2017 – 2021 the reports did not indicate if the harassment cases were sexual harassment reported against other SAS staff members, so these numbers have not been included. I have applied Section 17 of FOISA, the Scottish Ambulance Service does not hold the information you have requested.
Between 01/01/2019 - 16/10/2025 there have been 12 reports of sexual assault, rape or sexual harassment made by Scottish Ambulance Service Staff against other SAS staff.
Under data protection legislation, the Scottish Ambulance Service has a legal and ethical duty to ensure that personal data is not disclosed in a manner that could directly or indirectly lead to the identification of individual staff members. This includes circumstances where data is broken down into small subsets or categories that, when combined with other information, could reasonably result in individuals being identifiable.
In this instance, the numbers involved are too small to be disaggregated in the way requested without creating a significant risk of identification. As such, the requested breakdown by year, staff roles, outcomes or disciplinary actions cannot be provided, in order to uphold our obligations under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.
Please see the attached sheet detailing the number of sexual assaults perpetrated by a patient on a Scottish Ambulance Service member of staff.
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
<5
9
10
7
13
17
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.
We do not hold the information in a way that allows us to report on which of these incidents resulted in staff requiring sick leave or medical treatment. Also, claims aren’t classified to the level of being able to identify payments made due to violence/attack by a patient or able to filter whether the attack as gender based or a form of sexual harassment. It is for these reasons I have applied Section 17 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002; Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) does not hold the information that you have requested.
