General Practice Workforce , 31 July 2022

As Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) were established as statutory bodies from 1st July 2022, this publication no longer presents data at CCG and STP level. Data is instead 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 NHS geography updates that came into place on 1st July involved boundary changes, with some practices moving to different Sub-ICB Locations and ICBs than they would previously have been situated. Therefore, in order to have a consistent and comparable time series at regional level, we have re-produced all Individual and Practice-level CSVs, with practices and Sub-ICB Locations remapped to reflect this latest structure. 

For the Practice-level CSVs, this is the first time the full series has been re-published since a methodological change in December 2021 resulted in a total revision of the time series. For the December 2021 release, Practice-level CSVs for September of each year were published. This release presents all Practice-level CSVs back to September 2015.

Individual and Practice-level CSVs for June 2022 have been included for completeness, but are unchanged from those released as part of the General Practice Workforce, 30 June 2022 publication.

Mapping of practices to new structure

Currently open practices have been mapped to the Sub-ICB Location they sit under as at 1st July 2022 using Organisation Data Service (ODS) reference data. 

For practices in historical CSVs which are now closed, ODS data cannot be used to determine which Sub-ICB Location they would have belonged to on 1 July 2022, were they still open and active. For these practices, we used the Office of National Statistics (ONS) supplied postcode files that incorporate the approved ICB boundary changes, mapping each closed practice's postcode to the Sub-ICB Location, based on the postcode to Sub-ICB Location relationship in the ONS file.

Impact on estimations

The methodology for creating fully-estimated records involves calculating, for every job role and Integrated Care Board (ICB), a ratio of FTE and headcount per registered patient. We then calculate FTE estimates at Sub-ICB Location level by taking the ICB job role ratio and multiplying it by the total registered patient count for all practices in that Sub-ICB Location that did not supply valid data for the applicable staff group.

Because these ratios are calculated at ICB level, they can be affected by boundary changes where practices have moved from one ICB to another. Using 31st May 2022 snapshot data, we recalculated the estimates based on the new regional structure. The difference between the original England-level estimates and the recalculated estimates was no greater than 1 in headcount, and 0.51 FTE for any staff group. 

Table 5: Change in estimated FTE and headcount if July 1st mapping was used to recalculate estimates - England, May 2022

Because these differences are minimal, we have not attempted to recalculate estimates for historical reporting periods, which would have necessitated a revision of the entire time series. 

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].