Size of the NHS workforce
The NHS in Scotland directly employs over 164,000 staff (all figures in this blog are whole time equivalent (WTE) unless stated). This is an increase of 19% over the past 10 years.
Staff are employed directly by the 14 territorial boards, the six special health boards and Public Service Delivery Scotland.
The biggest staff group is nursing and midwifery which employs 69,117 staff.
There are 15,735 medical speciality posts.
Further detail on the size and breakdown of the NHS Scotland workforce can be found on the NES Scotland Turas website.
Mental health workforce
A separate report is published on the NHS Scotland mental health workforce. At the end of March 2026, there were 18,112.9 (WTE) posts in mental health services, teams and roles. The mental health workforce is multidisciplinary, with the majority of posts in mental health nursing (10,167.8). The Scottish Government’s recent Mental Health and Wellbeing and Delivery plan (2026) notes:
As we move towards a more prevention-focused approach, the role of the wider workforce beyond clinical settings must also be appropriately supported. Our work on system reform will also include consideration of where resource is required across the wider public and third sector.
Vacancy rates
Information on vacancy rates in NHS Scotland can also be found in the Turas dashboards, and are shown below for 30 June 2026. Further detail and time series can be found in the dashboard.
Job family | Number of vacancies | Vacancy rate (%) |
|---|---|---|
Allied health professions | 707.7 | 4.6 |
Medical and dental consultants | 432.2 | 6.4 |
Nursing and midwifery | 3115.4 | 4.3 |
Independent contractors
Within NHS primary care there are four independent contractor groups medical (GPs), dental, pharmaceutical and ophthalmic. These practitioners are usually independent of the NHS and are contracted to provide services on behalf of NHS Boards.
General practitioners (GPs)
As independent contractors most GPs are responsible for running the business affairs of the practice and employing and training practice staff. In September 2025, there were 3,657.1 GPs (excluding trainees) employed, an increase of 5.8% from September 2023.
In 2017, the Scottish Government committed to increasing the number [headcount] of GPs in Scotland by at least 800 over the next decade. In its report into General Practice (2025) Audit Scotland said:
The commitment to increase the number of GPs by 800 is unlikely to be met by 2027.
In November 2024, the Scottish Government published the GP Recruitment and Retention Plan. This outlined 20 measures aimed to improve the GP training pipeline and career pathway to recruit and retain GPs. An update on developments was published in March 2026.
Work has continued on improving GP recruitment and retention. The Scottish Government undertook a Future Medical Workforce project that considered what Scotland’s medical workforce would need to look like in the next 15–20 years. The Future Medical Workforce Project: phase 1 report (December 2025) set out the key insights and views of doctors. Phase two, which began in January 2026, is focused on co-designing solutions with the profession in relation to training reform, workforce planning, and service redesign.
As part of a three-year (2026-2029) funding agreement, between the British Medical Association (BMA)’s Scottish GP Committee and Scottish Government, recurrent funding has been made available to general practice to improve workforce capacity. Tranche 1 funding for 2026-27 has been allocated with the allocation of tranche 2 dependent on practices achieving increases to workforce capacity.
Optometrists
There are approximately 1,200 optometrists and dispensing opticians providing NHS funded eye care services in Scotland. The number of optometrists that are independent prescribers has increased and was 614 at 31 March 2025.
Community pharmacists
Like GPs, many community pharmacists are independent contractors, and there are also many who are employees of community pharmacy owners.
The Community Pharmacy Survey 2025 reported that there were 8,424 Pharmacists, Pharmacy Technicians and support staff employed (excluding relief staff, trainees, locums and central staff) (with a total Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) of 5,883.1) across Scotland at 13 September 2025.
Dentists
At the end of March 2026, there were 3,704 dentists working in NHS Scotland. Of these, 3,429 work in the General Dental Service (GDS) and Public Dental Service (PDS). This is an increase of 11.6% from 3,319 (3,010 GDS and PDS) in 2023.
More information can be found in the SPICe briefing Primary Care and General Practice in Scotland.
Social care workforce
The Scottish Government has overall responsibility for social care support policy in Scotland. However, statutory responsibility for delivering, commissioning and providing appropriate care capacity at a local level sits with local authorities, NHS boards, Integrated Joint Boards and private / third-sector providers.
The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) provides information on the paid social service workforce in Scotland. Its latest workforce report (2025) provides an overview of the data at a national level, with breakdowns by sub-sector and local authority area.
Sub-sector | Whole Time Equivalent (37.5 hours) |
|---|---|
Care homes for adults | 42,410 |
Housing support/ care at home | 56,400 |
Nurse agencies (recruitment firms that supply qualified nurses and care assistants to hospitals, care homes, and private clients) | 1,830 |
The SSSC is also responsible for developing the qualifications for social work and social care staff and registering and regulating staff. People can become a care support worker without any formal qualifications. However, a condition of registration is an undertaking to work towards a qualification. You can read more in the SPICe briefing Adult Social Care and Support in Scotland 2026 update.
Workforce planning
In 2017 and 2018, the Scottish Government published a National Health and Social Care Workforce Plan, in three parts.
- Part 1 – a framework for improving workforce planning across NHS Scotland
- Part 2 – a framework for improving workforce planning for social care in Scotland
- Part 3 – Improving workforce planning for primary care in Scotland, this focussed on developing, building and expanding multidisciplinary teams.
This was followed by the health and social care: national workforce strategy in 2022. This set the vision for the Health and Social Care Workforce as:
A sustainable, skilled workforce with attractive career choices and fair work where all are respected and valued for the work they do
It sets out actions at national level across the five pillars of workforce:
- Plan
- Attract
- Train
- Employ
- Nurture
University places
University applicants in Scotland apply for a restricted number of places, funded by the Scottish Government. For most subjects, the number of places is not set by Government but rather by the individual universities. This includes subjects such as physiotherapy and pharmacology.
For a small number of subjects (known as controlled subjects), the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) publishes intake targets. Controlled subjects include dentistry, medicine, pre-registration nursing and midwifery education, paramedic education, prosthetics and orthotics and Masters optometry. Information on the number of places for controlled subjects is published annually.
Subject | Number |
|---|---|
Medicine | 1,471 |
Dentistry | 678 |
Nursing and midwifery pre-registration | 10,857 |
Paramedic education | 943 |
Prosthetics and orthotics | 61 |
Masters optometry | 206 |
Once they have graduated, students are not required to continue working in the NHS in Scotland. However, dental students that receive the Dental Student Support Grant are required to work for NHS Scotland after qualifying for the equivalent number of years for which they received the grant.
Health and Care (Staffing) Act 2019
The Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Act 2019, commenced in 2024, provided a statutory basis for the provision of appropriate staffing in health and care services. The Act covered staff planning in health and social care services, with the aim that staffing in both sectors is organised and planned to ensure appropriate staff are put in place by providers of care to deliver safe and high-quality care. It did not address national workforce supply.
The Scottish Government publishes an annual report on the Act. The report, published in November 2025, outlined a number of themes that NHS Boards had identified as impacting on their compliance with the duties in the Act:
- eRostering
- reduced working week
- recruitment
- retention
- rural and Islands health and social care recruitment
- workforce planning
- protected learning time
- staffing level tools and the common staffing method
- further guidance on planning and securing services.
In relation to workforce planning, the report said:
Work is underway to develop a comprehensive plan that strengthens workforce planning across Scotland, ensuring it is fit for the future and aligned with the ambitions of the Service Renewal Framework.
In relation to social care, the report concludes:
While there is clear evidence of proactive compliance and innovation across the care sector, persistent challenges remain, particularly around recruitment, retention, training capacity, and financial sustainability.
Renewal and reform
The Scottish Government published its Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework 2025-2035, in June 2025. This discusses the future shape of the health and social care workforce:
Our workforce will be deployed differently in the future to achieve improved outcomes for the people of Scotland. We will work with partners to strengthen workforce planning to deliver services that are planned and designed based on population needs, aligned with the Population principle. We will ensure the workforce is at the heart of this decision making and is consulted throughout planning. The workforce will continue to be able to make their career choices based on their individual aspirations and we will seek to facilitate choices to work in different settings and across geographic and service boundaries.
It goes on to state:
We are shifting funding and workforce capacity into primary and community care, ensuring that prevention is embedded across the full spectrum of care […] Set out in the detailed Primary Care Route Map the actions and enablers required for this shift (workforce, infrastructure, systems), clarify the role and services to be delivered in the community, and support leadership and cohesion in our health services in the community.
However, the Primary Care Route Map has not been published at the time of writing and as noted above the current ongoing work on wider system reform will also influence the resource required across the wider public and third sector.
Although much of the detail about public service reform is still unknown, in relation to workforce targets, the Cabinet Secretary for Public Service Reform said in a letter to the Public Service Reform Committee:
The target outcome is a reduction of 2.5% in the overall public sector workforce size by 2029-30 whilst protecting frontline services. Over the five year period from 2025-26 to 2029-30 this equates to an average reduction of 0.5% per annum […] I am clear about the need to protect frontline services [often used to refer to staff who involved in the delivery of a service, such as doctors and paramedics], and our focus on reducing corporate costs, as outlined more fully in the Public Services Reform Strategy.
In evidence to the Health, Care and Sport Committee on reform the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Care said:
[…] the reforms must be about working better and differently, and about doing so together. I will be engaging hand in glove with our trade unions, because we are doing this with the workforce, not to the workforce. We are relying on the workforce to achieve high-quality services, so it will need to be involved in the design phase and have input into the full business case.
The Public Service Reform Strategy committed the Scottish Government to developing a workforce management policy and governance framework. You can keep up to date with Public Service Reform developments in a new series of blogs soon to be published by SPICe.
Lizzy Burgess, Senior Researcher Health and Social Care, SPICe
Photo credit: Centre for Workforce Supply (2025), Creative Commons License