General Practice Workforce 30 November 2020

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.