General Practice Workforce, 31 March 2023

Within published statistics, protecting the identity of individuals and their protected characteristics is of the upmost importance. This applies not only to citizens and patients that the NHS serves, but also to the workforce that it employs. Maintaining the anonymity of staff can present a challenge at times when there is a clear need to better understand the attributes and diversity of the workforce.

Within this release we have introduced a new granularity of ethnicity data in response to requests. This can be found in the accompanying General Practice Workforce Ethnicity by Job Role Excel workbook, which we will refresh every quarter. The release includes data for all General Practice job roles at national level, and for selected job roles within the GP staff group down to ICB level. The GP-only sub-national data is at high-level ethnic groupings, whereas national job role data is broken to further ethnicity sub-groups. To mitigate against identification and to present more easily interpretable ethnicity distributions across various groups, we have presented values as percentages of the total within each group, as opposed to raw numbers.

Users of the existing ethnicity data within this publication will also notice a change to the way this data has been presented - found in Table 7 of the main Excel bulletin tables file. Data had been previously published without any disclosure control methods applied, introducing risk to the identity of individuals and/or their protected characteristics which increases with the introduction of the new tables, which could be used in conjunction with Table 7 to attempt to identify individuals. To mitigate against this, we have rounded data to the following rules;

• All ethnic breakdown values between 1 and 7 have been rounded to 5,
• All other values being rounded to the nearest 5.
• Zero’s will be shown as “-“ (dash)

Similarly, the percentages presented in the new ethnicity by job role tables have been calculated based on headcount numbers which have been rounded to the above rules. Consequently, percentages may not sum to 100 and in some cases will mean that, where numerators and denominators are both small, 100% may appear in multiple cells for the same group.

Overall job role headcounts will remain unrounded in the tables as these data are available in other sections of the publication. Where total job role headcounts in England are 10 or less, information about the ethnicity distribution within that job role has been withheld.

Whilst we understand the removal of unrounded data in Table 7 represents a reduction in utility of these data, we hope that the additional data provides valuable insights into these groups. We also hope the rounded data in Table 7 can still be used to identify the main trends within the data.

To help users and to make them more accessible for screen reading technology, from this release we are presenting the GP joiners and leavers tables showing the percentages of each group joining or leaving within the period on separate worksheets in the GP Joiners and Leavers Excel workbook. Previously they sat alongside the full-time equivalent or headcount tables to which the relate. 

The job role GP Assistant was recently added to the National Workforce Reporting Service (NWRS). It will be included for the fist time in the General Practice Workforce, 30 April 2023 publication, scheduled for release on 25 May 2023.

Further information

If you have any comments or questions about these changes, please contact NHS England on 0300 303 5678 or email Primary[email protected].