FOI 26-060 Births in Ambulance from Caithness
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 26-060 Births in Ambulance from Caithness
- Request Date
- 02 Feb 2026
- Response Date
- 18 Feb 2026
- Information Requested
I wish to make a Freedom of Information Request for the number births that took place in an ambulance when transferring pregnant women from Caithness General Hospital Wick KW1 5NS.
To Raigmore Hospital Inverness IV2 3UJ & Aberdeen Royal Infirmary AB25 2ZN.
Postcodes KW14, KW13, KW12, KW11, KW7, KW6, KW5, KW3, KW2, KW1.
In 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 & 2025.
Plus the number pregnant women the SAS took into Lawson Memorial Hospital Golspie KW10 6SS to give birth.
With a breakdown of each year.
- Response
The Scottish Ambulance Service cannot identify where a birth has taken place specifically within an ambulance. Doing so would require complex bespoke analysis to correlate vehicle movement times with the time a birth was recorded on the Electronic Patient Report Form. For this reason, the information requested is not held in a recorded form, and section 17(1) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 applies.
Under section 15 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, we have nevertheless considered the limited information that is recorded, namely instances where a delivery time was noted on the Electronic Patient Report Form and the patient was conveyed from one of the requested postcodes to Raigmore Hospital, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary or Lawson Memorial Hospital, broken down by year.
However, in each year requested the number of such instances was fewer than five. Disclosure of these figures would therefore require suppression and could only be presented as “<5”, which would not provide meaningful information and would risk the identification of individuals when combined with the location and timeframe specified. To avoid the disclosure of personal data, this information cannot be provided, in line with section 38(1)(b) of the Act.
