Health Boards (December 2021): Names and Codes in Scotland

Health board names and codes for Scotland as of 31 December 2021. The dataset is published by the Government Digital Service on the Open Geography portal. It contains four text fields with specified lengths, including feature IDs and codes.

Use Cases

• Joining health board data to other datasets based on the provided HB21CD or HB21CDS codes.
• Creating reference maps or lists of Scottish health board jurisdictions based on the HB21NM names.
• Validating the geographic scope of health-related data using the standardized codes.

Strengths

• Provides a specific snapshot date (31 December 2021) for temporal consistency.
• Field lengths are explicitly defined (9, 3, and 25 characters) for data validation.
• Includes both a standard code (HB21CD) and a short code (HB21CDS) for different referencing needs.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect temporal bias inherent to the single snapshot date.

Provenance

Source

Government Digital Service

Collection Method

Publication process for the Open Geography portal.

Time Range

Snapshot as of 31 December 2021.

Freshness

Last updated 2025-08-11 08:00:17; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Scotland