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Publication, Part of

General Practice Workforce 31 October 2020

Official statistics

Publication Date:
3 Dec 2020
Geographic Coverage:
England
Geographical Granularity:
GP practices, Clinical Commissioning Groups, Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships, Regional health body, Regions, Health Education England Region, Primary Care Organisations
Date Range:
30 Sep 2015 to 31 Oct 2020

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General Practice Workforce 31 October 2020

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Report

Update: 4 February 2021

To provide the most up-to-date information possible to support workforce planning, and as requested by our stakeholders, we began collecting data on the General Practice Workforce monthly. 

This publication was the first to be released on a monthly rather than quarterly basis, and we identified a number of data quality issues that caused us to recommend that figures be interpreted with caution.

In particular, we identified a shortfall in the data provided for GP locums, and as a result, we included some estimated full-time equivalent (FTE) GP locum figures based upon the previous quarter's data, and published only FTE figures for all practice staff, while we developed a methodology to account for the missing headcount data.

It is now evident that the transition to a monthly collection in the autumn of 2020, led to a more wide-reaching decrease in the quality and completeness of the data. Therefore, although for transparency purposes we will preserve both this publication, and the second monthly release for November 2020, we will not use figures from these releases in any further analysis, and will not include them in time series tables.

This publication series is temporarily reverting to a quarterly collection from December 2020 onwards.

4 February 2021 09:30 AM

Page contents

Summary

This report presents data about GPs, Nurses, Direct Patient Care and Admin/Non-Clinical staff working in General Practice in England, along with information on their patients and practices.

This series of statistics is now collected and published monthly. This is the first release to be published using the monthly data collection, and due to data completeness and coverage issues with the GP locum data, we are releasing full time equivalent figures only at this stage. We have calculated estimated FTE figures for GP locums and aim to devise a methodology to estimate the headcount figures as soon as possible.

This release includes full time equivalent figures in the Excel Bulletin, which includes time series figures as well as breakdowns by characteristics such as age and gender. Practice-level figures are available in the CSV.

Information on the next phase of changes will be detailed in future publications. We welcome feedback from all our users on these proposals, by email to: [email protected].

Information about the contents of this publication and how it can and cannot be used, can be found in the Report tab. Our publication includes information on recent and planned changes as well as highlighting future developments. We are continually working to improve our publication to ensure the components are as useful and relevant as possible for our users.

In the publication of data for 30 September 2019, released 28 November 2019, we implemented a range of improvements and revised the time back to September 2015 when these statistics were first published. As the new time series supersedes earlier figures, we have archived the original publications and advise you not to use them.

Links to other publications presenting healthcare workforce information can be found under Related Links.

Due to issues with the completeness of the GP locum data, headcount figures are not currently available. We have calculated estimates for FTE figures, but the methodology for estimating for missing locum headcount counts is still under development.

The effect of seasonality on general practice workforce trends, means that comparisons between different releases should only ever be made on a year-on-year basis. As this is the first release of these statistics covering October, these figures have no available direct comparison.

Comparisons with other months or quarters should not be made. Consequently no attempt to quantify percentage increases or decreases in FTE figures is made in this release. 

 

General practice workforce interactive dashboard

Open the dashboard

This tool is in Microsoft PowerBI which does not fully support all accessibility needs. You can find the source data in our fit notes issued by GP practices If you need further assistance, please contact us for help.

Full-Time Equivalent

is a standardised measure of the workload of an employed person and allows for the total workforce workload to be expressed as the equivalent number of full-time staff. 1.0 FTE equates to full-time work of 37.5 hours per week, an FTE of 0.5 would equate to 18.75 hours per week.

All GPs

35,416 Full-time equivalent

Fully qualified GPs (excludes Registrars)

28,007  Full-time equivalent

Qualified permanent GPs (excludes Registrars and Locums)

26,714  Full-time equivalent

Nurses

16,682  Full-time equivalent

Direct patient care staff

14,530  Full-time equivalent

Admin / non-clinical staff

68,638  Full-time equivalent

Key Facts

Last edited: 8 July 2021 4:15 pm