GP Appointments Data

The GP Appointments Data collection was started to collect information regarding appointments in general practice, now delivered through Primary Care Networks (PCNs).

It is acknowledged that NHS services come under significant additional pressure across winter and other holiday periods and whilst there are regular flows of data regarding secondary care, the understanding of capacity and utilisation of primary care services is limited.

Therefore, in support of this and other objectives originally set out in the Five Year Forward View (and more recently in the NHS Long Term Plan), NHS England has been directed by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), to collect this transactional level dataset.

This notice is served on:

• general practices in England
• primary care networks (PCNs) in England

Data is collected on a weekly basis to show a three month forward view of planned appointments capacity per general practice. Therefore, each week, there will be one additional week of new data looking forward and the remainder will be a delta of previous returns.

A backward look will also be collected to show the outcome and status of the planned appointments capacity going back to the start of the collection. However, it is anticipated that further back than one week, data will remain static and the data delta will predominantly be for the previous week only.

The GP live collections timetable provides further details of when this data collection will take place. Please note that this timetable is a live document and may be edited to reflect a change to the collection schedule; users are advised to check this regularly for updates.

20 April 2023: Updated specification added to page; no impact on the DPN and data providers have already been notified of the changes.

13 November 2023: Version 3.0 of this notice issued to reflect the legal and organisational changes which came into effect on 1 July 2022 and 1 February 2023 and to reflect changes to the data collection since the previous Data Provision Notice was published.