FOI 25-015 Vape Incidents at School
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 25-015 Vape Incidents at School
- Request Date
- 08 Jan 2025
- Response Date
- 10 Jan 2025
- Information Requested
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following
information from this trust. Please may you provide me with:1) How many times has an ambulance needed to attend a secondary school to provide
medical assistance to a pupil as a result of vaping recorded during the years 2022, 2023 and
2024?2) How many of those secondary school aged pupils you had to attend to at a school then
had to be taken to hospital as a result of vaping recorded during the years 2022, 2023 and
2024?Please can you provide the information in the body of an email, or in a table, and make clear
the numbers associated with each year requested.- Response
We note that you have referenced FOIA 2000, please note the Scottish Ambulance Service
is responding under FOISA 2002 (Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002).
The Scottish Ambulance Service does not hold the data-set to search for incidents involving
vapes/e-cigarettes/cigarettes.
Public authorities are not required to create information in order to answer a request.
There’s a distinction between creating new information, and compiling information. Where a
request can be answered by compiling information from readily-available resources held by
the public authority, this is not the same as creating new information. However, if collation of
the information would require skill and complex judgement, the information is not held.
I have concluded that, in the case of data about specific addresses we are unable to
produce this information without complex skill and judgement. This is because, although we
hold information about incidents at specific locations and can report this at a postcode level,
to report this at an individual address level we would be required to apply complex
judgement. The reason for this is that there are multiple addresses within a postcode, there
is also the potential for an incident to occur outside a premises and therefore not be
attributed to a specific address. In addition we do not hold incidents against a category of
‘Secondary Schools’. It is for these reasons we have applied exemption Section 17 of the
Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002 as information not held
