FOI 26-106 Alcohol or Drug related Incidents
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 26-106 Alcohol or Drug related Incidents
- Request Date
- 25 Feb 2026
- Response Date
- 10 Mar 2026
- Information Requested
I am a strategic planning advisor within Healthcare Improvement Scotland and I'm wondering if you would be able to provide the following data to include in our system level impact analysis for drug and alcohol use: Alcohol related SAS incidents: Total number of alcohol related SAS incidents recorded for financial years 2023/24 and 2024/25 brown down by council area. Drug related SAS incidents: Total number of drug related SAS incidents recorded for financial years 2023/24 and 2024/25 broken down by council area for individuals who were not transported to ED.
Clarification provided - Total number of SAS incidents where a drug-related overdose was recorded for financial years 2023/24 and 2024/25 broken down by council area for individuals who were not transported to ED. - Just a note to say this is to feed into our non-fatal overdose analysis, so if the incident involved a fatal drug related overdose can this be excluded?
- Response
For clarity, the Scottish Ambulance Service cannot provide information relative to drug-related deaths. These are classified by the National Records of Scotland on receipt of a toxicology report. Therefore, we cannot split by fatal and non-fatal overdoses.
Drugs – this has been defined as incidents where the final crew code was ‘Overdose’ and the patient was not conveyed to hospital.
Alcohol – this has been defined as an incident where the Overdose Substance Alcohol = TRUE or Substance Condition = Alcohol (any final code could be used).
It is important to note when interpreting this data – This report has been produced in two parts, this is due to the ongoing integration of a new system. This data cannot be merged into one table due to an overlap in a phased introduction of each system and the methodology for the data time frames is different.
The first tab of the sheet takes data collected from our legacy system (T2) and the second tab of the sheet details data collected from (T3)
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
