FOI 25-132 Sexual Harassment in SAS
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 25-132 Sexual Harassment in SAS
- Request Date
- 17 Mar 2025
- Response Date
- 01 Apr 2025
- Information Requested
I am requesting the following information: Number of Sexual Harassment Complaints: Please provide the total number of formal complaints of sexual harassment received by the Scottish Ambulance Service for each calendar year from 2019 to the present date.
Please provide the numbers broken down by year.
Sexual Harassment Policy: Please provide a copy of the Scottish Ambulance Service's current policy on sexual harassment.
Procedure for Handling Complaints: Please provide a description of the steps the Scottish Ambulance Service takes to deal with complaints of sexual harassment, including any internal investigation processes, disciplinary procedures, and support mechanisms offered to complainants.
- Response
The Service has a range of measures in place to help protect staff. Known or reported areas where staff have previously faced violence or threatening behaviour are taken into consideration and communicated to attending crews. Scottish Ambulance Service staff are trained in managing aggression and assessing risk, enabling them to better judge when they need to wait for support from the Police or request additional service support.
Please see the attached sheet detailing the number of sexual assaults perpetrated by a patient on a Scottish Ambulance Service member of staff. This information is not held in a way that allows us to report on the assault type, brief descriptions or genders involved. It is for this reason we have applied section 17 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002 to this part of your request, as information not held.
There are a total number of 9 Scottish Ambulance Service employees accused of sexual harassment from 01/01/2019 - 27/03/2025. Any further breakdown of these figures could result in individuals becoming identifiable.
For the given data, you will see that some of the figures are shown as, five or less than five, please note that this figure has been suppressed because the statistical value is less than five. The Scottish Ambulance service has a duty, under the Data Protection Act to avoid directly or indirectly revealing any personal details. It is therefore widely understood that provision of statistics on small numbers, five or less are statistically suppressed upon disclosure.
The Scottish Ambulance Services operates within the Once for Scotland guide provided by NHS Scotland; this guide sets out the standards of behaviour under the Conduct Policy. The procedure for handling conduct issues within the Scottish Ambulance Service is the Once for Scotland Conduct Policy and the Once for Scotland Investigation Process – both of these can be found on the NHS Scotland site:
Conduct Policy Overview | NHS Scotland
Workforce Policies Investigation Process Overview | NHSScotland Careers
- Response Documents
