These General Practice Workforce statistics were first published following the creation of the workforce Minimum Data Set (wMDS) in September 2015. Figures produced before September 2015 were based upon a different, less detailed data set, and are not comparable with any figures in this series although they are available on our website for reference purposes. Please refer to the Data sources section below for more information.
The majority of these figures are a snapshot of the workforce and relate to the last calendar day in the reporting period, while information published separately in Annexes B and C of the Excel tables relates to numbers of people working as GP locums in a short-term and/or short-notice capacity during the period since the previous snapshot. We refer to these GPs as ad-hoc locums and information about them is collected differently to the rest of the workforce. Because the ad-hoc locum figures are calculated differently, the FTE and headcount figures are not directly comparable with the snapshot of the main workforce Please refer to the section about locum GPs in Using this publication for more information about this.
Not all general practices provide valid data. In some cases, practices provide details about a staff member but no information about their working hours. In these cases, we calculate full-time equivalent (FTE) estimates for these staff and include these measures in the FTE totals and in the Practice-level and Individual-level CSVs that accompany the publication. We refer to these estimated working hours and FTE figures as ‘partial estimates’ and provide details of the percentage of estimated working hours for each staff group in Annex A of the Excel Bulletin table.
However, in some cases, practices provide no valid data whatsoever for an entire staff group (GPs, Nurses, Direct Patient Care (DPC) or administrative staff). We have calculated Sub-ICB Location-level estimates for these practices based upon a level of perceived need according to the number of patients registered at the practice.