Hospital at Home Programme – March 2026 update

Hospital at Home

Hospital at Home (H@H) is a short-term, targeted intervention providing acute level hospital care in an individual’s home or homely setting.

This programme:

  • has high satisfaction and patient preference across a range of measures.
  • reduces pressure on unscheduled acute care in hospitals by avoiding admissions and accelerating discharge.
  • has consistent evidence of lower costs compared to inpatient care.

What we do

Optimise and expand H@H services:

Support NHS boards/HSCPs to optimise and expand their adult and paediatric H@H services.

Develop new H@H services:

Support remote and rural areas across Scotland to implement new adult services.

National Learning System:

Enable adult and paediatric H@H services to share and learn from each other.

National Infrastructure:

Develop national infrastructure to enable sustainable adult and paediatric H@H services.

Impact so far

12% increase in patients managed by hospital at home services

15,811 adult patients were managed by H@H services from January to March 2025

17,768 adult patients were managed by H@H services from January to March 2026

Adult H@H services prevented over 17,500 people spending time in hospital during January to March 2026, relieving pressure from A&E and the Scottish Ambulance Service.

Delivering patient centred care

“We are so grateful for the compassion and dedication shown by the whole team. This service is invaluable, and we can’t thank the staff enough for the care they provided”
Daughter of patient supported by Falkirk’s Hospital at Home Service.

“The care my son received was excellent and avoided multiple additional trips to hospital which are very difficult for him to manage and very stressful for us, his parents”
Parent of patient supported by East Lothian’s Hospital at Home Service.

Working with 13 NHS boards across Scotland

We are working with services across 13 NHS boards to create new services, improve the resilience of existing services and evaluate new ways of working.

Growing capacity to be bigger than Western General Hospital

In March 2026, there was the equivalent of 695 adult hospital at home beds with an occupancy rate of 80%. This is larger than Forth Valley Royal in NHS Forth Valley.

Service updates

Neonatal and Paediatric H@H

NHS Tayside has begun seeing patients using an multidisciplinary teams (MDT) approach led by AHPs.
NHS Lanarkshire has continued seeing paediatric patients and are testing changes to expand their services.


Adult H@H

In NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Renfrewshire and East Renfrewshire have successfully recruited and are working together as a joint team. East Dunbartonshire are preparing to launch a new service in April.
NHS Highland have launched a service in Inverness. Argyll & Bute are supported by a pharmacist working remotely as a test of change. NHS Argyll and Bute now have remote pharmacist support in place.

Site visits

Neonatal and Paediatric H@H

In March 2026, we arranged for neonatal and paediatric H@H teams to visit established services in England. Five Scottish teams visited services in Oxford and London to learn about how services developed and the impact of their work.


Adult H@H

We also visited the adult H@H team in Shetland to support and improve processes relating to capturing and using patient feedback. We used a variety of QI tools to work through each stage of the process, assigning responsibilities and generating ideas. The team in Shetland were left with a clear plan for creating improvements to their service.

Supporting service

“Enabled clear, constructive planning to ensure we knew how we’re going to achieve our aims. This would ordinarily have taken months to achieve against other commitments”
Comment card feedback from an attendee at NHS Shetland site visit.

Information sources