Publication, Part of Archive of General Practice Workforce publications
General Practice Workforce 30 November 2020
Update: 4 February 2021
To provide the most up-to-date information possible to support workforce planning, and as requested by our stakeholders, we began collecting data on the General Practice Workforce monthly, and published statistics based on the first of these monthly extracts for October 2020.
This publication was the second to be released on a monthly rather than quarterly basis, and we identified a number of data quality issues for both releases that caused us to recommend that figures be interpreted with caution.
In particular, for October 2020 we identified a shortfall in the data provided for GP locums, and saw only a slight improvement for this publication. As a result, for both monthly releases, we included some estimated full-time equivalent (FTE) GP locum figures based upon the previous quarter's data, and we published only FTE figures for all practice staff, while we developed a methodology to account for the missing headcount data.
It is now evident that the transition to a monthly collection in the autumn of 2020, led to a more wide-reaching decrease in the quality and completeness of the data. Therefore, although we will preserve the publications for October and November 2020 for transparency purposes, we will not use figures from these releases in any further analysis, and will not include them in time series tables.
This publication series is temporarily reverting to a quarterly collection from December 2020 onwards.
4 February 2021 09:30 AM
Summary
This report presents data about GPs, Nurses, Direct Patient Care and Admin/Non-Clinical staff working in General Practice in England, along with information on their patients and practices.
This series of statistics is now collected and published monthly. This is the second release to be published using the monthly data collection, and due to data completeness and coverage issues with the GP locum data, we are releasing full-time equivalent (FTE) figures only at this stage. We have calculated estimated FTE figures for GP locums and aim to devise a methodology to estimate the headcount figures as soon as possible.
This release includes FTE figures in the Excel Bulletin, which includes time series figures as well as breakdowns by characteristics such as age and gender. Practice-level figures are available in the CSV.
Information about the contents of this publication and how it can and cannot be used, can be found in the Report tab. Our publication includes information on recent and planned changes as well as highlighting future developments. We are continually working to improve our publication to ensure the components are as useful and relevant as possible for our users.
In the publication of data for 30 September 2019, released 28 November 2019, we implemented a range of improvements and revised the time back to September 2015 when these statistics were first published. As the new time series supersedes earlier figures, we have archived the original publications and advise you not to use them.
Links to other publications presenting healthcare workforce information can be found under Related Links.
Highlights
Due to issues with the completeness of the GP locum data, headcount figures are not currently available. We have calculated estimates for FTE figures, but the methodology for estimating for missing locum headcounts is still under development.
The effect of seasonality on general practice workforce trends means that comparisons between different releases should only ever be made on a year-on-year basis. As this is the first release of these statistics covering November, these figures have no available direct comparison.
Comparisons with other months or quarters should not be made. Consequently no attempt to quantify percentage increases or decreases in FTE figures is made in this release.
Full-Time Equivalent
is a standardised measure of the workload of an employed person and allows for the total workforce workload to be expressed as the equivalent number of full-time staff. 1.0 FTE equates to full-time work of 37.5 hours per week, an FTE of 0.5 would equate to 18.75 hours per week.
All GPs
35,395 Full-time equivalent
Fully qualified GPs (excludes Registrars)
28,079 Full-time equivalent
Qualified permanent GPs (excludes Registrars and Locums)
26,783 Full-time equivalent
Nurses
16,700 Full-time equivalent
Direct patient care staff
14,704 Full-time equivalent
Admin / non-clinical staff
69,015 Full-time equivalent
Key Facts
Resources
Last edited: 25 May 2021 11:45 am