1. Introduction and key points
The purpose of this Statistics Release is to present national figures for care homes for adults in Scotland. All figures relate to 31 March 2008 and are provisional. As such they are subject to change. The final figures will be published in subsequent statistics bulletins. The information is derived from the Scottish Care Home Census.
Some of the information which used to be collected as part of the Scottish Care Home Census is now collected by the Care Commission. This information is not included in this publication. More details of this can be found in the background information section at the end of this statistics release. All figures in this release omit care homes that deregistered to become Housing Support services.
Chart 1: Places in Care Homes for Older People per 1,000 Population Aged 65+, March 2008

- At 31 March 2008 there were a total of 1,426 registered care homes providing 42,874 places to 37,471 residents.
- There were 942 care homes for older people as at 31 March 2008 compared to 1,060 at 31 March 2000.
- There were 37,829 registered places in care homes for older people. The number of places has increased by 0.7 per cent since March 2007 and decreased by 3.5 per cent from the March 2000 level.
- The number of care homes for adults with learning disabilities has decreased by 19.2 per cent since March 2000, from 386 to 312 as at March 2008.