FOI 25-592 Number of Patients seen within a 12hr shift
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 25-592 Number of Patients seen within a 12hr shift
- Request Date
- 19 Dec 2025
- Response Date
- 23 Dec 2025
- Information Requested
Please may I have the number of patients seen per shift by an ambulance crew on a give shift (using 12 hours as an example) between 1/12/24 to present?
- Response
The Scottish Ambulance Service does not record or report a standard metric of “patients seen per crew per 12hour shift.” Patient contacts are recorded per incident (and can involve multiple patients and multiple resources), and crews’ activity cannot be reliably attributed to a fixed 12hour shift in a way that reflects actual workload.
Producing a figure would require creating new information through complex linkage and subjective attribution—for example reconciling CAD/ePCR records with individual crew rosters, shared incidents, handover delays, redeployments, and nonpatient tasks—and applying considerable skill and judgement to decide how to count shared activity. FOISA does not oblige authorities to create new information or undertake bespoke analytical work to generate it. It is for this reason we have applied section 17 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002, as information not held.
By way of context, a crew’s patient load varies significantly due to geography (urban/rural), incident type and acuity, hospital handover times, time of day/day of week, and operational redeployments. These factors mean any “patients per 12hour shift” figure would be highly variable and dependent on assumptions.
