GP Consultation Summary

Author

NES Data Group

Published

October 22, 2024

1 Proposed change

We proposed to merge the GP Headcount Official Statistics publication into our quarterly publication on NHSScotland Workforce Statistics.

This GP Headcount publication was previously published by PHS as part of the GP Headcount and List Size Official Statistics. When this was transferred to NHS Education for Scotland (NES), PHS have continued to publish the List sizes, whilst NES focusses on providing Workforce statistics.

The proposed changes are:

  1. Increase the publication frequency from annually in December to biannually in June and December.

  2. Produce a dashboard, with commentary published as part of our annual report published in June.

  3. Stop the production of formatted Excel tables, although the retain ability to export data from our dashboards into excel.

The same information would be made available:

  1. Overall headcount of GPs

  2. GPs by Age group, Sex, and Designation

  3. Geographical breakdowns of the above figures by NHS board and by council area

This information would mirror how we publish data on Dental practitioners.

These changes would not affect the Primary Care Survey and the Primary Care Out of hours survey publications.

2 Survey responses

We received 8 responses: 4 in favour, 3 who responded don’t know and 1 who was not in favour of the changes.

Of these responses, 5 were from organisations and 3 were from individuals.

Of those who responded they were unsure or were not in favour of the proposed change, there was concern about the lack of WTE information within the GP Headcount Publication. We publish GP WTE data as part of the Primary Care survey and work continues to improve the timeliness of the supply of the WTE data that will be able to augment the data we publish from NPCCD.

There was also concern about the lack of information on the other roles within Primary Care within the GP Headcount publication. The data source for this is also the Primary Care survey, however as this survey is not complete statistical techniques are used to estimate the total WTE of GPs and the headcount and WTE of other roles in Primary care.

Action

Continue to work with GP groups, NHS NSS and Scottish Government to improve the quality and timeliness of the WTE data and workforce data for other roles from the Primary Care Survey.

Other concerns were raised about whether the change would affect the open data that PHS publishes which is at practice level.

This change will not impact that.

Action

Improve the signposting between the different publications, including the PHS Open Data practice level and data sources to allow users to easily navigate between the different sources of data on the GP workforce.

No concerns were raised about the change in format, providing that the data would still be able to be downloaded. The data will be available to be downloaded in from the PBI dashboards in a similar manner to the rest of the NHS Scotland workforce data.

There was broad support to increasing the frequency of the data.

3 Next steps

As the responses were mainly supportive, and those with concerns were not related to the frequency or format of the currently available headcount data, the NES Data Group will proceed with the proposed change.  

The NHS Scotland Workforce Statistics will include data on the GP Headcount, and will be published on the 3rd of December.

The Primary Care Workforce Survey and the OOH Primary Care Survey will be published on the 10th of December.