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Collaborative Healthcare in Scotland: Delivering the services children need in the community

Policy & Public Affairs: Scotland
This report, published in May 2025, puts a spotlight on community child health services in Scotland, addressing challenges and providing recommendations to strengthen community paediatric services. We urge the Scottish Government and health boards to publish consistent and uniform community paediatric waiting times data and to ensure timely, effective care for all children and young people in Scotland.
Repeated icons of 'dynamic child'

While researching for this report, which you can download below, we sought to gain a picture of service pressures in community child health services. Unlike data on waiting times for paediatric outpatients, inpatients and day cases used in our Worried and Waiting report (2024), data for community paediatrics is not published for all health boards on Public Health Scotland.

As such, in an effort to gain a picture of waiting times across Scotland, we submitted Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to all 14 health boards. Unfortunately, the data we received was incomplete and inconsistent, highlighting the urgent need for mandatory data collection and publication for community paediatrics across the health boards.

We quickly uncovered a glaring inconsistency in data recording, preventing us from obtaining a clear picture of the need across Scotland. If we cannot grasp the full scale of the need, how can we possibly address it?

Dr Mairi Stark, RCPCH Officer for Scotland

To get a better understanding of existing concerns and pressures, in 2024 we surveyed RCPCH members working in community paediatrics in Scotland. Our core themes and recommendations are based on member insights. With these insights, we present recommendations on five themes:

  1. The urgent need for data
  2. Creating a sustainable child health workforce 
  3. Collaborative care
  4. Positive transitions to adult services
  5. Neurodevelopmental services

We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to our RCPCH &Us team and Children's Health Scotland for their invaluable involvement. The voices of children and young people were crucial in shaping our recommendations.

You can read about all of our recommendations, plus insights from both our members and children and young people in Scotland, in our full report. View or download: