General Practice Workforce 31 August 2021 - Provisional

In July 2021, we introduced a new version of the National Workforce Reporting Service (NWRS). The new workforce reporting service, which is now open for new submissions, is easier to use and has been designed with direct feedback from users.  The aim is to make the task as simple and efficient as possible to help minimise the burden placed upon practices and Primary Care Networks.  

This is the second release to be based on the monthly collection of general practice workforce information and all figures presented are provisional and potentially subject to revision. As users are encouraged to make only year-on-year comparisons due to seasonality effects upon the workforce, and no previous August workforce figures are available, only statistics relating to August 2021 are presented.

As the data owners, General Practices and PCNs are responsible for the quality and completeness of the data that they provide to us and the new version of NWRS is easier and more intuitive to use so we anticipate that the data quality will improve.

Since the July 2021 release, we publish this series of Official Statistics every month. We advise all users to take care when interpreting these figures and urge all users to make comparisons across time only to the same point in previous years. As this will be the first time that these statistics have been produced for certain months, it will not always be possible to make comparisons with previous years which should be taken into consideration when interpreting the figures. As there is no previous set of statistics relating to the month  August, only August 2021 figures are presented in the Excel bulletin tables.

Every April, following changes such as CCG mergers, we revise the Individual and Practice-level CSVs to reflect the latest geographical structures which enables users to better understand the workforce history and trends within their regions. We issue these new files as close to the start of the financial year as possible and advise you accordingly.

There are a number of planned structural changes that are expected over the coming year and approximately 42 Integrated Care Systems are expected to replace CCGs/STPs during the financial year. We will reflect these changes in our Official Statistics in due course and advise you when the changes are made.

We are planning to introduce a quarterly publication which will bring together the general practice workforce, including ad-hoc locums and the Primary Care Network workforce.