The 2023 Staff vacancies in care services report

10 Mar 2025

This Staff vacancies in care services 2023 report is jointly published by the Care Inspectorate and the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC). This report provides data on vacancies reported by care services as at 31 December 2023. It presents data on the number of registered care services with a vacancy, the number of actual vacancies that services say they had using whole time equivalent (WTE) data, and data on the reasons why services have reported that vacancies are hard to fill.

The report shows that at 31 December 2023,

  • 48% of registered care services reported having staff vacancies.
  • in 12 of the 32 local authority areas, 50% or more services reported vacancies.
  • care at home services, housing support services, care homes for older people and care homes for adults faced the most challenge in filling vacancies.

The most common reasons for vacancies not being filled are too few applicants, too few applicants with experience and too few qualified applicants.

Download

The supporting data excel tables for the 2023 Staff vacancy report (showing data for 2021 to 2023) are available here.