General Practice Workforce 31 October 2020

This publication presents statistics relating to the general practice workforce in England as at 31 October 2020. As described in the Overview, only full time equivalent figures are included in this release. We will update this publication with headcount figures as soon as a robust methodology to estimate headcount figures for missing GP locum data can be devised.

Accompanying this publication are the following additional files and tools to enable further analysis:

• September 2015 to October 2020: High-level FTE figures in the Excel Bulletin tables and the Power BI dashboard
• October 2020 only: Regional FTE figures in the Excel Bulletin tables.
• October 2020 only: Practice-level data in the Comma Separated Values (CSV) file.

We are keen to ensure that our reports are as useful and relevant as possible for our users. We are therefore continually working to improve the quality of the data and analysis. Changes can include improving the coverage, completeness or accuracy of the data, or revising elements of the methodology and are made in consultation with colleagues, including within the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSEI) and Health Education England (HEE). We welcome feedback from all our users and you can contact us at [email protected], please include "GP Workforce" in the subject line of your email.

These General Practice Workforce statistics are relatively new, following the introduction of a new primary data source in September 2015 and any figures published within this series are not comparable with figures from earlier years.

We now use two main data sources to produce these statistics. The workforce Minimum Data Set (wMDS) collected directly from general practices via the National Workforce Reporting System (NWRS) data entry module provides information on all staff except GP Registrars. Until January 2019, some figures were supplied to us directly by Health Education England regions, but the NWRS has included this HEE data since March 2019 making it the main data source for the general practice workforce.

All information relating to GP registrars is taken from the Health Education England (HEE) Trainee Information System (TIS) which has been our primary data source since June 2018, as it provides more complete and timely data than the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) which was the main source of our GP registrar data up to that point. A comparison of the TIS and ESR data sets enabled us to calculate estimates for GP registrar counts back to September 2015 to produce a more consistent national time series although regional comparisons cannot be made prior to June 2018.

In addition to the estimates for GP registrars prior to June 2018, we have also produced estimated figures for GP locums and revised our entire full-time equivalent time series in November 2019 which relates to statistics for September 2015 to September 2019. This means that the figures released in November 2019 supersede earlier releases and because the figures are not comparable, we have archived these publications to avoid confusion. More information about these estimates and the methodologies is in the General Practice Workforce 30 September 2019 publication, released 28 November 2019 and details on GP registrar data source and estimations methodology are in the Data Quality Statement accompanying the publication of December 2018 data. Information about changes to GP locum time series is available in the Data Quality Statement accompanying the publication of September 2019 data.

More information is also available in What this publication can tell you about.

Not all GP practices provide valid data which means some figures are estimated. For the October 2020 data collection, 98.9% of eligible general practices provided valid GP data for non-registrar GPs, with GP data for the remaining 1.1% of practices estimated.  Full-time equivalent (FTE) figures were also estimated for otherwise valid records with no submitted hours, which affected GP records in 5.2% of practices in October 2020. More information about the estimation methodology can be found in the Data Quality Statement that accompanies this publication; the estimation rates for all four staff groups can be found under Estimation Rates below.

We identified a significant decrease in the number of infrequent locums in the October 2020 data extract which may be due in part to the new monthly data collection and the fact that practices are not yet accustomed to providing this on a monthly basis. For more information, please refer to the October 2020 Data Quality page. This means that we have calculated estimated figures for a large proportion of the infrequent locum full time equivalent (FTE) figures for October 2020. However, we are still working on a methodology to estimate headcount figures which is complicated by the nature of this element of the workforce. As a result, this release includes only FTE figures.

From July 2019 GP practices have been joining with other health and care providers to form Primary Care Networks (PCNs) and will work collaboratively with network members to strengthen primary care. Since that time, Clinical Directors for the PCNs have been recruited and information about these individuals was included in the September and December 2019 publications. However, a PCN specific data collection has now been created and information on Clinical Directors and other PCN staff will now be published in a Primary Care Network Workforce series of Official Statistics. However, the transfer of records between practices and PCNs is still ongoing and figures for some Clinical Directors are still included in a separate table in this release.

More information on these changes can be found in the accompanying Data Quality Statement and on the October 2020 Data Quality tab.

Following stakeholder feedback and in light of changes to the way in which users engage with data and information, we are reviewing the publication content and outputs with a view to streamlining its contents and standardising the release. As a result of this activity, it is likely that in addition to open data, we will encourage greater use of interactive resources to enable our users to interrogate the data according to their particular needs.

Estimates are made for full-time equivalent (FTE) figures for those practices which did not provide complete and/or valid data for one of the four staff groups; this could be due to poor data quality or no submitted data.

Full Estimation - practices who provided no valid data for one or more staff groups. For these practices, CCG-level estimations were made.

Partial Estimation - practices whose data contained one or more otherwise valid records with no submitted hours. These records were retained and the full-time equivalent (FTE) estimated.

Table 1: Percentage of practices with estimated records, October 2020

Due to the effect of seasonality on general practice workforce trends, 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. 

It is not always possible or appropriate to compare figures over time, depending on how they were originally calculated. Where this is the case, clear indications have been included in the publication(s) and associated supporting material. Sometimes we may advise that comparisons might be made with caution, knowing that the impact of these changes is small. We will always aim to give guidance on how to interpret any changes in the series, to ensure time series comparability is as clear as possible.

These statistics are now produced on a monthly basis, with the time series going back to September 2015 when this data collection was first made. The collection was initially biannual, until December 2016 when GP data began to be collected quarterly. Data for the other staff groups began to be collected quarterly from December 2017, and the data has begun to be collected monthly from October 2020.