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.