1 · What this console shows
Real, published Public Health Scotland A&E, bed-occupancy and delayed-discharge reports populate the console automatically. Their reporting periods differ. The composite strain score is an interpretive planning tool, and scenario changes are illustrative.
2 · Public sources and reporting cadence
The collector discovers downloads through the official PHS portal, checks each complete CSV against an independent CKAN row count, and publishes a dated package. Each panel displays its own report period.
| Panel | Definition | Publication cadence |
|---|---|---|
| A&E | Type-1 EDs; All attendance category counted once; latest 30 reported weeks | Weekly |
| Occupancy | All Specialties, territorial-board aggregate occupied/staffed bed days | Quarterly |
| Delayed discharge | All Delay Reasons, ages 18+, territorial-board census counts | Monthly |
| Site names | Exact published treatment-location code lookup | Reference updates |
A source check cannot make an older report more recent. Report dates and package capture time remain separate. The latest available bed quarter can lag the weekly attendance data substantially.
3 · System strain index INTERPRETIVE
The 0–100 composite uses declared planning weights: 40% A&E reference gap, 20% over-12-hour share, 15% mean board occupancy and 25% delayed-discharge count. These weights and scaling bounds are illustrative, not fitted clinical risk estimates. Mean board occupancy gives equal weight to each board.
Labels are Normal (<40), Elevated (40–57), High pressure (58–73), and Severe (74+). Read the underlying values and periods before interpreting the label; it does not activate an incident or assess patient safety.
4 · A&E 4-hour performance MEASURED
Within-four-hour attendances divided by total attendances across the reported Type-1 sites, for each of 30 weeks. The 95% blue line is a planning reference. PHS explains that weekly ED figures cover a subset of A&E activity and should not be used to assess the full four-hour A&E access standard.
5 · Emergency-department comparison MEASURED
Sites are ordered by their published within-four-hour percentage for the latest report week. The count waiting over 12 hours appears alongside it. Case mix, location, service scope and attendance volume differ; this is a descriptive comparison rather than a quality league table.
6 · Long waits MEASURED
Counts above eight and twelve hours come from the same selected Type-1 reports. The over-twelve-hour group is contained in the over-eight-hour group, so the counts must not be added. They support service-planning review; the console does not calculate excess deaths or individual risk.
7 · All-specialty bed occupancy MEASURED
For each of the 14 territorial boards: occupied bed days ÷ staffed bed days ×100. The collector selects each board's own aggregate and exact All Specialties category once, excluding site-level, All Acute and individual-specialty rows. The 85% and 92% color bands are illustrative planning references, not universal clinical safety thresholds. No live available-bed count is inferred.
8 · Delayed-discharge context MEASURED
Monthly census counts use ages18+ and All Delay Reasons once per territorial board. Age or reason subgroups are not added again. These reports help identify questions about discharge pathways, but their separate reporting period and aggregate scope cannot establish that a backlog caused a particular A&E wait.
9 · Scenario sandbox
Pressure-test the response plan against the real baseline. Four what-ifs adjust the inputs and recompute the strain index: winter surge (4-hour −15pp, occupancy +5, delays +15%), norovirus bed closures, staffing shortfall, discharge gridlock (delays +40%). These are clearly labelled as what-ifs, never forecasts — they exist to rehearse decisions, e.g. "a winter surge tips us from High pressure to Severe; is the escalation plan ready for that?"
10 · England comparator DATED REFERENCE
The England panel retains explicitly dated May2026 context and links to NHS England's original releases. It is not part of the automatic Scotland update. England's all-type figure and Scotland's Type-1 subset have different scopes and are not a like-for-like country ranking.
11 · Automatic refresh and failure behavior
The scheduled workflow checks PHS every Tuesday at13:43UTC. It validates source identities, complete downloads, mutually exclusive category selections, counts and reporting periods before publishing. GitHub schedules are best effort.
The hosted page checks its published package at startup, every six visible hours, on foreground return when due and through Check published reports. Invalid, partial, older or failed responses retain the last good package. Offline files use embedded reports. Scenario selection is preserved, and updated reports recompute the summaries and response checklist automatically.
No visitor key or provider credential is required. A maintainer can run python3 scripts/refresh_nhs.py and verify portable/embedded agreement with python3 scripts/refresh_nhs.py --check. Source URLs, hashes and coverage counts are in the public report package.
12 · Honest limits & appropriate use
- Cadence, not real-time. Weekly (A&E) to quarterly (beds). This is a situational read, not a live operational monitor.
- Descriptive, not predictive. No figure forecasts future performance; the scenarios are rehearsals, not predictions.
- One week is noisy. Always read a single ED's week against the national trend.
- Definitions matter. Type-1 (major ED) figures differ from all-types; cross-board and cross-country comparisons carry caveats.
- Snapshot vintage. The console states its data dates; refresh per Section 11 for current figures.