CCAS was operational from late March 2020 until May 2021, and this publication covers the period from its inception until the end of March 2021. The data provided to us presents the number of hours for which GPs were paid, according to the month in which the payment claims were processed.
Generally, the month of processing related to hours worked in the previous month, and this is what we have assumed when calculating quarterly figures. For example, we allocated working hours that were processed and paid in October 2020 to the July-September 2020 quarterly figures.
Because it was a new service and it took time to develop a reliable payroll system for CCAS, there were some delays to processing payments for hours worked in March and April, and some of these payments were therefore processed and paid more than a month in arrears. Figures for the April-June 2020 quarter also include hours worked in March 2020 as these were processed in May and could not be distinguished from April’s hours in the available data. However, as CCAS was launched late March 2020, the number of working hours included in the April-June 2020 quarterly figures is believed to be relatively low.
The data set includes retrospective adjustments, for example payments processed late or what appear to be negative hours worked, as adjustments were made for overpayments or incorrect hours in previous months; in such cases, it is not possible to be certain of the month for which the adjustment applies, so we have treated all adjustments – both positive and negative – as being applicable to the month before the processing took place.
The data set included some hours paid for sickness absence, which means the actual hours reported are slightly inflated; the scale of hours paid for sickness is not known.
Although all GPs were paid for the hours spent on mandatory training, the hours spent on training are not included in these figures.
In some cases, GPs appear to have worked extremely long hours in a particular month, sometimes seemingly with no worked hours in the previous month. It could be that in these instances, several months of their working hours have been processed together, resulting in the appearance they worked very long hours in the preceding month. It is not possible – using the data available – to confirm when each GPs’ hours were actually worked so they have been processed as though all hours were worked in the month immediately prior to processing. This means that there may be some unavoidable distortion to the quarterly working hours figures.
When considering the quality of the data, it is important to recognise that the systems created were not intended to produce data for statistical purposes. The systems and processes implemented were created for the specific purpose of delivering an emergency healthcare service and paying its workforce during a period of crisis. As a result, while the data set provides a valuable insight into the CCAS workforce, its suitability in understanding the detail and time series of the provision during the period of its operation is limited, and we are not able to provide a month-by-month breakdown. Since it is not possible to be confident about which hours were worked in which months, figures are presented on a quarterly basis. However, presenting these figures in a quarterly time series mean that peaks and troughs in the provision cannot easily be identified. For example, we know that demand for CCAS consultations varied in accordance with the infection rate, so would expect there to have been fewer appointments in August 2020 than at other points in the summer. However, this cannot be easily seen with the published quarterly data. Similarly, based upon the infection rate, we may have expected to see high hours of CCAS provision in January 2021 and lower demand for appointments as the year progressed; however, again such fluctuation cannot be discerned within the quarterly figures.