NHS Payments to General Practice England, 2020/21

'NHS Payments to General Practice in England', analysed by individual provider of general practice services and main payment category, presents information on NHS payments made to GP practices, Walk-in Centres and (combined) Walk-in Centres and Out-of-Hours practices. It is not a record of the amount of money available for direct patient care, nor the total invested in patient care through general practice. Instead, it constitutes the majority of actual monies paid to practices for all activities and costs during the 2020/21 financial year.

The amounts reflected in this report present

• payments to practices captured by NHS Digital’s GP Payments system – National Health Applications and Infrastructure (NHAIS), also known as “Exeter”
• payments extracted from NHS England and NHS Improvement’s Integrated Single Finance Environment system (ISFE) which records invoices paid by CCGs, regional local teams and by NHS England and NHS Improvement.
  Complete ISFE data was not available before 2016/17 which should be taken into consideration when comparing figures from previous reporting periods.

Practices may also receive payments directly from other organisations such as Local Authority Public Health bodies but it is not currently possible to capture such payments for this report.

The payments made to individual practices for each payment category covered by this publication are available in the Annex 1 Excel file (see Resources on the Overview page). 

The report is produced by NHS Digital (the trading name of the Health and Social Care Information Centre - HSCIC) in consultation with the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), which is chaired by NHS Digital and has representatives from the British Medical Association General Practitioners Committee (GPC), NHS Employers, NHS England and NHS Improvement, the Health Departments of the four UK countries and the Review Body on Doctors’ and Dentists’ Remuneration.

Due to the inclusion of ISFE data since 2016/17, it is not appropriate to make comparisons with previous years.

Following a methodological change in 2018/19 to the way in which patient counts are calculated, comparisons of average payments per patient should not be made with figures prior to 2018/19 although England-level average payments per registered and weighted patient have been recalculated for 2016/17 and 2017/18 and are included here for reference.

GP practices and other providers of general practice services included within this report should use their usual local Primary Care Support England (PCSE) payments contact for queries on the figures in the first instance.

NHS Digital welcomes feedback on the methodology and tables within this publication. Please contact NHS Digital with your comments and suggestions, clearly stating ‘NHS Payments to General Practice’ as the subject heading via [email protected] or by telephone on 0300 303 5678.

The data (rounded to the nearest £100,000) show the sum of NHS payments to general practice were as follows:

£9,683.7 million across 6,808 general practice service providers of which[1]:

• £6,684.4 million was to 4,720 providers with a GMS contract
• £2,784.5 million was to 1,831 providers with a PMS contract
• £186.4 million was to 177 providers with an APMS contract
• £28.5 million was to 80 providers with an unknown contract type

This equates to:

• £2,152.6 million to 1,058 providers for dispensing services
• £7,498.9 million to 5,651 providers for non-dispensing services
• £32.2 million to 99 providers with an unknown dispensing status
• The average NHS payment was £159.61 per registered patient and £159.61 per weighted patient[2]
   

^{[1] 99 practices contained data from ISFE only - and therefore did not have any practice or population information recorded in the 2020/21 NHAIS data extract (including dispensing status). Of these, some contract types were identified from other data sources where available, however contract types could not be found for 80 providers.}

^{[2] Average payments per patient at CCG, region or national level should be treated with caution as some patients may be double-counted – for example due to practice closure. Conversely no information relating to patient list size is known for 108 practices.}

^{Please refer to the Patient List Size in the Data Quality section for more detail.}