Since the July 2021 release, we publish this series of Official Statistics every month. We advise all users to take care when interpreting these figures and urge all users to make comparisons across time only to the same point in previous years. As this will be the first time that these statistics have been produced for certain months, it will not always be possible to make comparisons with previous years which should be taken into consideration when interpreting the figures.
This is the fifth release to be based on the monthly collection of general practice workforce information and all figures presented are provisional and potentially subject to revision.
In August 2021 we revised the entire time series back to September 2015, making several methodological changes to the way in which the workforce numbers are calculated. However, following stakeholder feedback we have conducted a further comprehensive review of the methodology. Please refer to the Methodological Review page for more details. Until the planned methodological changes resulting from this review can be implemented, all published figures remain provisional and we will not be presenting a time series. Therefore, only statistics relating to November 2021 are included in this release. We intend to revise and re-introduce the general practice workforce timeseries when 31 December 2021 data are published in early February 2022.
Every April, following changes such as CCG mergers, we revise the Individual and Practice-level CSVs to reflect the latest geographical structures which enables users to better understand the workforce history and trends within their regions. We issue these new files as close to the start of the financial year as possible and advise you accordingly.
There are a number of planned structural changes that are expected over the coming year and approximately 42 Integrated Care Systems are expected to replace CCGs/STPs during the financial year. We will reflect these changes in our Official Statistics in due course and advise you when the changes are made.
We are also planning to introduce a quarterly publication, initially focusing on the GP workforce, to complement this new monthly publication, which will bring together GPs working in general practice , including ad-hoc locums and those working in Primary Care Networks and potentially other settings such as A&E streaming. We will continue to provide updates on these plans as they develop.