FOI 26-215 Naloxone Usage
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 26-215 Naloxone Usage
- Request Date
- 06 May 2026
- Response Date
- 18 May 2026
- Information Requested
This is a request to your ambulance trust for the following information using the FOI Act.
From January 2023 to February 2026 – broken down by month – could you please tell me:
The number of doses of naloxone that were administered by ambulance crews?
The number of patients given naloxone by ambulance crews?
One trust has responded and explained that their information was taken from the system using the following information: (Naloxone administrations where code ‘NLX’ was recorded on the electronic patient as a drug administered by the crew)
If the information has already recently been released – can you please redact and send the response to me please?
- Response
The Scottish Ambulance Service does not hold a complete and reliable record of the number of individual doses of naloxone administered. While administration of the medication is recorded, the number of doses given during an incident is not consistently captured in a structured format that would allow extraction without the creation of new information.
In accordance with section 17(1) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, the Scottish Ambulance Service does not hold this information.
The Scottish Ambulance Service does not hold the number of individual patients who were administered naloxone. While patient identifiers such as CHI may be recorded, this information is not consistently captured within the dataset and therefore does not allow for the reliable identification of unique patients.
In accordance with section 17(1) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, the Scottish Ambulance Service does not hold this information.
The Scottish Ambulance Service records naloxone administration as part of the clinical information recorded within the electronic patient record. For the purposes of this response, the data has been defined as incidents where naloxone has been recorded in the “drug administered” section of the record.
Please find attached a table showing the number of incidents where naloxone was administered by Scottish Ambulance Service crews, broken down by month from January 2023 to February 2026.
Please note caution when interpreting this data
It should be noted that the figures provided relate to incidents rather than individual patients. In some cases, more than one patient may be present at an incident, and naloxone may be administered to more than one individual.
Additionally, incidents where naloxone is administered are not limited to those recorded as drug overdoses, as naloxone may be used in a range of clinical circumstances where opioid involvement is suspected.
Other organisations may use different methods to identify naloxone administration (for example, the use of specific codes such as ‘NLX’). The Scottish Ambulance Service does not use a single standardised code for this purpose, and therefore direct comparisons should be made with caution.
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)
Where blank fields appear, there are no incidents to report.
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
