General Ophthalmic services workforce statistics - 31 December 2019

Official statistics

Methodology

An annual extract is downloaded from the Central Ophthalmic Payments system containing the following data items:

Data Items	Description
Org Code	3-digit code denoting the NHS England region/LHB where the practitioner provides services.
Org Name	The name of the organisation.
GOC	6-digit General Optical Council (GOC) professional registration number.
Uniform List Number	A person identifier - a concatenation of Ophthalmic list type (OPL, SOL, OL), GOC and Org Code
Surname	Surname of the practitioner
Other Names	Forename(s) of the practitioner
GMC	7-digit General Medical Council (GMC) professional registration number – only applicable to OMPs.
Date of Birth	Date of birth of the practitioner
Sex	Practitioner gender, Male or Female
Optician Group	Denotes whether practitioner is an Optometrist or OMP
Start Date	Date when a record opens on Open Exeter
End Date	Date when a record closes on Open Exeter

The data processing steps are:

Checks on completeness of data fields particularly GOC, GMC, gender and the organisation code for each practitioner.
Removal of records not open on the snapshot date (31 December), either with a start date after the extract date, or an end date prior to the extract date.
Data is divided into separate England / Wales datasets using organisation code.
England only – check practitioners are Ophthalmic Performers List (OPL) staff. Using unique identifiers (GOC/GMC/Surname) duplicates are removed. An OPL practitioner can only appear on the list of one region.
Wales only – check practitioners are Ophthalmic List (OL) or Supplementary Ophthalmic List (SOL) staff. Using unique identifiers (GOC/GMC/Surname) duplicates are removed according to the Welsh regulations. Practitioners can appear on the OL in more than one LHB. They cannot be on the SOL if an OL. If a practitioner is only on the SOL they can only be on the list of one LHB.
Produce the final publication statistics from these England and Wales datasets.

Last edited: 7 March 2024 5:27 pm