General Practice Workforce, 30 June 2022

Please note that as Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) were established as statutory bodies from 1st July 2022, this publication will no longer present data at CCG and STP level. From this publication onwards, data will be aggregated to Sub-ICB Location, and ICB level. For further information on these changes please see the following links:

• NHS England - ICBs in England
• Organisation Data Service (ODS) - ICBs

The new 106 Sub-ICB Locations have retained the same codes as the 106 CCGs they have replaced. Similarly, the 42 ICBs retain the codes of the 42 STPs. In the regional bulletin tables and CSVs accompanying this release, the names of the Sub-ICBs and ICBs have been presented. The official naming convention for the Sub-ICB Locations is the name of the parent ICB followed by the old CCG code. However, to aid users, where there is more than one Sub-ICB Location at an ICB we have suffixed the Sub-ICB name with the name of the CCG they have replaced.

Though there is a one-to-one match of CCGs to Sub-ICB Locations and STPs to ICBs, boundary changes within some areas have resulted in some practices moving to different Sub-ICB Locations and ICBs than they would previously have been situated. This means that to allow for historical comparisons, regional time series data needs to be revised, with practices mapped to the Sub-ICBs and ICBs they belong to from July 1 2022. 

For this release, Annex C in the Excel Bulletin Tables file, which presents a time series of ad-hoc locum full-time equivalent and headcounts down to Sub-ICB level, has been revised back to December 2017. National totals are unaffected by this remapping but some figures at Sub-ICB (previously CCG) and ICB (previously STP) levels may differ to those previously published. Improvements introduced to the processing of ad-hoc locum data since the figures were first calculated have also made a small difference to England-level figures for some months.

Changes to Practice and Individual-level CSV columns - name changes and removal of HEE region fields

In the Practice and Individual-level CSVs, column names have been changed from CCG_Code and CCG_name to Sub_ICB_Code and Sub_ICB_name and from STP_Code and STP_Name to ICB_Code and ICB_Name to reflect the NHS geography changes.

The publication CSVs have historically presented Health Education England Region names and codes for reference, despite these regions ceasing to be official geographies a number of years ago.  We have consulted users  and have taken the decision to remove this information from the CSVs, not least because it is not possible to remap PCNs to HEE regions to account for boundary changes.

Users who import the files into their own platforms will need to ensure any required edits to processes are updated accordingly, to account for these changes.

Regional restructure - revision of historical CSVs

Each year we re-produce historical practice and individual-level CSVs, with practices and CCGs (now Sub-ICB Locations) remapped to reflect the latest NHS England and Improvement regional structure. We plan to reproduce all historical Practice and Individual-level CSVs from September 2015 to May 2022 to reflect the new structure, and republish them as part of the 31 July 2022 General Practice Workforce publication, scheduled for release on 25 August.  

Further information

If you have any comments or questions about these changes, please contact NHS Digital on 0300 303 5678 or email Primary[email protected].