General Practitioner Workforce in Alternative Settings July 2019 - September 2019, Experimental Statistics

The nature of primary care provision is changing, with GPs and other staff providing primary care services not only in general practices, but also in a range of other “settings” for example providing care in Minor Injury Units, Urgent Treatment Centres and Accident and Emergency departments.

Information, derived from individual record-level data, is already published about GPs and the associated practice staff as follows:

• GPs in General Practices in the General Practice Workforce statistics 
   
• GPs and other healthcare professionals directly employed by hospital trusts in NHS Workforce Statistics 
  Additional work is needed to identify which staff – if any might reasonably be classified as providers of primary care.
   
• Where available, details of individuals providing NHS funded care in the independent sector are captured and reported in NHS Digital’s Independent Healthcare Provider Workforce Statistics   

However, there may remain an uncertain number of GPs and other healthcare professionals providing patient care in these alternative settings about whom very little is known and there is a desire to more fully understand the entirety of the healthcare workforce by collecting accurate and complete information.

We are working closely with key stakeholders including Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSE&I) and Health Education England (HEE) to explore the best way to collect data for this part of the GP workforce and are in the process of reviewing the quality, completeness and coverage of this particular collection to determine whether its findings meet user needs or whether it would be preferable and feasible to collect record-level data directly from the providers.