Diabetes: Scottish Diabetes Survey

The Scottish Diabetes Survey is a key source of information on diabetes in Scotland covering prevalence, characteristics, diabetes care and outcomes relevant to the Diabetes Improvement Plan (see policy context section).

The 2023 survey reports that at the end of 2023 there were 353,088 people with a diagnosis of any type of diabetes in Scotland recorded in SCI-Diabetes (an electronic patient record), reflecting a crude (unadjusted) prevalence[i] of 6.5% of the population of all ages.

This includes 36,249 people with type 1 diabetes (10.3% of people with diabetes), 310,541 people with type 2 diabetes (88.0% of people with diabetes) and 6,298 people with other forms of diabetes including gestational diabetes (1.8% of people with diabetes). Crude prevalence in Scotland by type of diabetes is 0.7% for type 1 diabetes, 5.7% for type 2 diabetes and 0.1% for other forms of diabetes.

In 2023 the age and sex standardised prevalence rates of diabetes by health board varied from 4.4 per 100 population in NHS Shetland to 6.3 per 100 population in NHS Lanarkshire for type 2 diabetes. Type 1 rates were similar across all NHS Health Board area with an average of 0.7 per 100 population.

Chart 1 shows the incidence[ii] of diabetes in the Scottish population included in diabetes registers. The rise in incidence of type 2 is likely to reflect increases in the risk of diabetes such as overweight and obesity as well as other factors such as an ageing population, earlier diagnosis and better survival of people with diabetes. The higher incidence of type 1 diabetes observed in 2021 does not appear to have persisted. Higher incidence of type 1 diabetes in 2020 and 2021 compared to pre-pandemic years has also been observed in other countries.

[i] Prevalence refers to the total number of new and existing cases in the population for a given time period.

[ii] Incidence refers to the number of new cases of a disease or condition in a given time period.

Eye Health

The 2023 Scottish Diabetes Survey reported that 52.3% of people with type 1 diabetes who had attended diabetic eye screening had diabetic retinopathy, and this figure was 21.1% for those with type 2 diabetes.

Information is available from Public Health Scotland on the number of eye tests carried out for people with diabetes (in the data table entitled "Clinical conditions relevant to eye care, table 3a").

Information on the number of retinopathy screening tests is also available from the annual reports of the national retinopathy screening service. The most recent report is from 2018/19.

Please note: If you require the most up-to-date data available, please check the data sources directly as new data may have been published since these data pages were last updated. Although we endeavour to ensure that the data pages are kept up-to-date, there may be a time lag between new data being published and the relevant ScotPHO web pages being updated.