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Gaps in Scotland’s health and social care data hinder performance assessment

  • Area of Work: The ALLIANCE
  • Type: News Item
  • Published: 13th January 2026
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Findings reinforce ALLIANCE concerns on declining performance, limited reporting and inequalities

The Auditor General for Scotland and the Accounts Commission have published a joint briefing highlighting gaps in national data on community health and social care, making it difficult to assess the impacts of health and social care integration.

The briefing notes that there remains a lack of consistent national data on demand, workload, quality of care and outcomes. This limits the ability to evaluate how effectively services are improving people’s quality of life. Analysis also indicates a long-term trend of declining performance and satisfaction amid rising demand, slow progress in shifting care toward community and preventative services, variable levels of choice and control for service users, and a gap between ambitions to address health inequalities and actual improvement. The report particularly highlights the ongoing lack of performance reporting by integration authorities and at a national level.

A new interactive tool has also been launched to enable Integration Authorities (IA) and Health and Social care Partnerships to compare local and national performance and provides data on the national integration indicators broken down by each IA.

The ALLIANCE welcomes both the briefing and the interactive tool, which provide valuable insights at IA level. At the same time, the report underscores the persistent challenges posed by limited and inconsistent data. These findings reinforce the ALLIANCE’s long standing concern about the lack of transparent national reporting and the need for robust data to support decision making and improvement,

The briefings recommendation also align closely with the ALLIANCE’s calls for an integrated health and social care record, improved data collection and disaggregated reporting to monitor outcomes and inequalities. While the interactive tool represents an important step forward, the ALLIANCE stresses that stronger, more comprehensive national data is essential to improve services and ensure people’s experiences and needs are central to health and social care planning

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