NHS Lothian
NHS board based in Edinburgh, Scotland

NHS Lothian is one of the 14 regions of NHS Scotland. It provides healthcare services in the City of Edinburgh, East Lothian, Midlothian and West Lothian council areas. It is headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Services
It is responsible for the care provided by around 29,000 staff at a number of locations:
21 hospitals, including four major teaching hospitals
126 GP practices
180 community pharmacies
173 dental practices
112 ophthalmic practices
Community Health Partnerships
The Edinburgh Community Health Partnership (CHP) has responsibilities around delivering community health services and also addressing inequalities in Edinburgh for NHS Lothian.
When the CHPs were established in 2005 they provided a single management structure, taking over control of community services which were transferred under their control. On 1 April 2007, Edinburgh Community Health Partnership was formed by the merging of 2 CHPs: Edinburgh North and Edinburgh South.
NHS Lothian's Accident and Emergency
Accident and emergency departments are located within the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, St. John's Hospital and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. Performance has been rated the poorest in Scotland. Only 89.4 per cent of emergency patients were treated or admitted within four hours in November 2017.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “NHS Lothian” is nHS board based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lothian, board and based, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “nHS board based in Edinburgh, Scotland” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6954149. VIAF identifies the subject as 155237623. The Library of Congress control number is nr2002014687. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2007 and 2017.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
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Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “NHS Lothian”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow NHS Lothian primary sources, NHS Lothian archive and Lothian research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “NHS Lothian” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.