The National Primary Care Clinicians Database (NPCCD) is a centralised database of primary care clinicians and general practice details, held at PHS but with data maintained by NHS Boards.
It currently contains details of all General Practitioners (GPs) and Optometrists/Ophthalmic Medical Practitioners validated to work in the Board area and locum for others. The data is used for onward feeding of other NHS systems, such as for verification and payment purposes as well as source data for National extracts as appropriate.
Following the introduction of New CHI, NPCCD is now the single source of truth for all GP practitioner and practice data in Scotland. Legislation states that all practitioners must be on the performer list (NPCCD) and validated prior to commencing work.
Work is ongoing to include Dental practitioners as well. More information on this can be found on the NSS NPCCD publication page.
Data on all GPs who have a non-locum contract with a GP Practice on the 31 March and 30 September each year are extracted from the NPCCD. This will include GPs who are on Maternity leave and other long term absences. It will also include any trainee, GP registrar, who has a contract to work in the practice on those dates. Typically a GP registrar will spend 6 months of their first year and all of their third year in primary care, with the remaining time on rotations within secondary care.
GPs who are on a locum contract, even if this contract is on a long term basis – covering for a maternity leave etc - are not included.
We include GPs with a contract:
The contract must not have:
GP headcount is published, with breakdowns available on the age, sex and Designation of GPs.
The Inflow, Outflow and turnover rate are calculated.
The data are also used in the Primary Care Workforce Survey to weight the results.
Data is maintained by NHS Boards to manage their performer lists.
Contract details may be updated to indicate changes for a time after the contract has ended.
Currently, all data is revised, meaning historical changes can affect the time series, although these changes tend to be small.
The most recent data point in the time series is labelled as provisional as this is more susceptible to larger changes.