The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is having major effects on how GP practices manage their workload, following requests from users we are releasing this management information to provide greater transparency and more timely data from our General Practice Appointments Data collection. This release includes data from the week beginning 1st October 2018 to the latest data available - the intention is to publish this data weekly to support primary care services during COVID-19 and allow for comparison with previous years.

Data is collected from GP systems which are designed for practices to use in everyday work and not for the purpose of data analysis. There are no national standards for data entry about activity and there is widespread variation in approach to appointment management between practices. This means that there are variations in data quality between practices.

This information does not give a complete view of GP activity so should not be used to infer a view of workload. The data presented only contains information which was captured on the GP practice systems. This limits the activity reported on and does not represent all work happening within a primary care setting or assess the complexity of activity.

These management information data may show slight differences if compared to the monthly official statistics subsequently released due to data cleansing processes applied.

For complete data quality notes, please see GP Appointments Supporting Information document.

We welcome user feedback on this release as we look to develop it in line with user needs. Please email open-data@nhs.net.