High Blood Pressure: prevalence

Scottish Health Survey

The Scottish Health Survey collects information about whether respondents have been told by a doctor that they have high blood pressure. In addition, blood pressure is measured for a subset of survey participants. Chart 1 shows the estimated prevalence of high blood pressure in the adult population of Scotland in 2016 to 2019. The figures are the percentage of survey respondents aged 16 and over who reported that their doctor had told them that they had high blood pressure. To increase the sample size available, data from the 2016 to 2019 surveys combined were used in the blood pressure analysis. The estimates exclude high blood pressure that occurred only in pregnancy. The prevalence of high blood pressure rises sharply with age in both sexes.

The Scottish Health Survey was published in 2021, however due to limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic blood-pressure measurements were not performed.

Quality and outcomes framework (QOF)

The QOF (part of the 2004 general practice contract) collected data on the number of patients in each general practice who had been diagnosed with high blood pressure. These data are available for the period 2004/05 to 2015/16. For Scotland as a whole the prevalence of high blood pressure based on QOF registers was 13.9% in 2015/16. More information on QOF is available in the ScotPHO QOF overview and in the PHS QOF pages.

Although QOF was discontinued from April 2017 some GP practices continue to provide GP practice level prevalence estimates for high blood pressure (hypertension). These can be viewed via an interactive dashboard.

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.