Dear Siobhan,
Thank you for carrying out the helpful compliance review of the PHS Stage of Treatment statistics. I was delighted that these statistics retained the accredited official statistics status following my team’s work to develop their trustworthiness, value and quality in 2025. I particularly welcome your acknowledgement of our work to ensure the changes to improve the statistics’ relevance and timeliness was conducted transparently and with integrity.
We have made the following changes in response to OSR’s recommendations to enhance users’ understanding of the statistics:
- Provide more specific guidance about the comparability of waiting times statistics pre and post guidance implementation and more prominent advice about the risks of adding waiting lists together
- The 28th April publication (based on data up to end of March 2026) will include an updated version of the PHS Impact Assessment (first published in October 2025) incorporating data up to the end of March 2026. Our commentary will be clearer about the size of the change for each of the key metrics and we will refer to this in the monthly report published in April and in future releases where applicable.
- The 3rd February 2026 monthly publication (based on data up to end of December 2025) reinstated our advice (highlighted in bold) that the number of ongoing waits inpatients, day cases, new outpatients and any other service (e.g. diagnostics) should not be added together to determine the proportion of the total population waiting for these types of care. This warning will be included in future monthly releases and we will proactively engage with users who use the statistics in this way.
- Explain how these statistics relate to similar measures across the UK
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- The 28th April publication (based on data up to end of March 2026) will identify and summarise key messages from the existing work published by ONS on UK health statistics’ comparability. These insights will continue to be included in future monthly releases. We will also engage with UK contacts and groups to identify other information that we could provide to help users understand what data can and can’t be compared across the UK.
The review also highlighted the need to record and publish details of the full list of roles receiving pre-release access (PRA), review the list regularly and ensure PRA is justified, proportionate and minimised. We work with colleagues in Scottish Government and NHS Boards to coordinate the PRA process and have not, to date, experienced issues arising from misuse or early reporting of information provided via PRA. I share OSR’s commitment to ensuring the PRA process is transparent and robust and have taken the steps outlined below to enhance our approach.
- From today, the PHS website’s about our statistics page has a new pre-release access transparency section listing the roles that require PRA to all PHS statistics releases as well as those who require PRA to the Stage of Treatment release.
- As the weeks progress, we will continue to update this new section with PRA details for all other PHS statistics releases.
- I have reviewed the SoT PRA list and the list of roles who receive PRA for all PHS releases. I am assured that the roles named in those are justified, proportionate and we are appropriately minimising the risk of leaks and disorderly publication. I will of course continue to monitor these lists as we publish them going forward for all other releases.
I am copying this letter to Alistair McAlpine, Scottish Government Chief Statistician and Anita Morrison and Nicola Edge, Heads of Health and Social Care Analysis, Scottish Government, whose teams work with PHS to manage the PRA process and are supporting us to implement the changes outlined above.
Yours sincerely,
Scott Heald
Director, Data and Digital Innovation
Head of Profession for Statistics