Ethnic group
NHS Digital also receives counts of patients registered at each practice grouped into 20 ethnic groups. These are aggregated into 6 ethnic groups to make these data easier to interpret. The 6 ethnic groups are:
- ASIAN_OR_ASIAN_BRITISH
- BLACK_OR_AFRICAN_OR_CARIBBEAN_OR_BLACK_BRITISH
- MIXED_OR_MULTIPLE_ETHNIC_GROUPS
- NOT_DEFINED
- OTHER_ETHNIC_GROUP
- WHITE
Assessments and care plans
GP practices also provide the count of patients up to the end of the reporting period who have received or declined: an assessment for dementia; an initial memory assessment; a referral to a memory clinic; a care plan; a care plan review.
Data relating to Care Plans and Memory Assessments should not be compared with that previously collected under the GP Enhanced service, which ended in March 2015.
Data relating to assessments for dementia, memory assessments and clinics are presented as cumulative counts from the previous October. For example, the count of patients receiving a dementia assessment published in December 2017 will be the sum of assessments carried out in October, November and December 2017.
From the November 2018 release, counts of data for patients with a coded dementia diagnoses who have received a medication review in the preceding 12 months are now collected.
Prescribing of antipsychotics
GP Practices also supply the number of patients with a dementia diagnosis who have had a prescription of antipsychotic medication in the last 6 weeks. This is further divided into patients who have or do not have a diagnosis of psychosis. To prevent the release of disclosive information, practice data with values lower than five (including zero) are replaced by a “*” symbol. All other practice numbers are rounded to the nearest five. Other geography totals are not suppressed or rounded.
Practices included in the data set
The GP Extraction Service (GPES) extracts data for practices that were open at the relevant date point, being the last day of the month for which data were extracted. We call this the ‘total estate’. This estate only includes those practices defined as a ‘GP Practice’ on the organisational reference data we hold. We do not include practices defined as walk-in centres, out of hours clinics, or prison prescribing cost centres. A further adjustment to the total estate from previous extracts is to also exclude ‘shared’ and ‘dormant’ practices.
Shared practices are those practices which share a clinical system. GPES cannot extract data from these practices, so they are excluded.
Dormant practices are those practices where the practice code has yet to be fully closed, but which have no associated clinicians.
The GPES extract is not instantaneous; it runs over a number of days – known as the “extract window”. Depending on the length of this window, GPES may not manage to collect data for all potential practices.