General Practice Workforce 30 September 2020

We are continually working to improve our publication to ensure the components are as useful and relevant as possible for our users. Currently, we are reviewing the contents of the General Practice Workforce series, to rationalise the content of the files produced and identify areas for improvement. We have discussed a range of improvements with our stakeholders which will be implemented incrementally over the current and forthcoming releases. At each stage, we will announce our proposals in advance and give you the opportunity to provide feedback.

In May, we published initial proposals for changes which were included in the August publication of June 2020 data. In August we published our proposals for the second set of changes which will come into effect in the 26 November publication of September 2020's biannual tables.

These changes mean that we are focusing on producing consistent and standard Bulletin Tables for all reporting periods which will form the core of each publication. These new tables replace the previous spreadsheets published for March and September data, and the four high-level staff group tables that we used to publish for June and December. This means that the same content will be included in the main Bulletin Tables for every release. The upcoming changes to the biannual tables mean will see us providing additional detailed breakdowns of regional figures as well as some supplementary tables of Experimental statistics, both streamlined to focus on the most valuable content. The detailed Regional tables will also be accompanied by two interactive pre-set pivoted tables based upon the Individual-level CSV (to which we have added a new age band column), and which you will be able to manipulate as required. 

We will be removing two columns of contextual practice information from the Practice-level CSV: the number of dispensing patients registered at a practice (TOTAL_DISP_PATIENTS) and the practice’s contract type (CONTRACT). This data will instead be produced separately as part of the biannual publications of March and September data. The GP Practice Contract Type chart in the Power BI report will also be removed.

We welcome feedback from all our users on the publication and you can get in touch with us at [email protected] and please include "GP Workforce publication review" in the subject line of your email.

The final stage of our review will consider the CSV files, and any feedback you can provide on which of their data items (columns) you find useful and which you do not need would be appreciated. In addition, we will be reviewing the CSV file names and welcome any suggestions to help us clarify their contents.