NHS Payments to General Practice, England, 2016/17

The data (rounded to the nearest £100,000 and including ISFE payments) show the sum of NHS payments, made in 2016/17, to providers of general practice services were as follows:

• £8,883.8 million was paid across 7,763 general practice service providers, of which:
  • Global Sum accounted for £3,176.8 million
  • QOF accounted for £690.8 million
  • Nationally the average NHS payment, including ISFE payments, was £151.37 per patient.

_{Notes:
There are a range of factors which may affect how the figures may be interpreted which should be taken into consideration:}

• _{Since the data are cash or invoice-based, they exclude accruals, pre-payments and other accounting adjustments made outside of the reporting year. Figures may include payments to practices that are no longer actively providing primary care medical services but received payments during 2016/17 for services in the previous financial year}
• _{Some adjustments made during payment processing may result in what appear to be "negative payments" or "positive deductions".}
• _{Figures may also include payments which are re-allocated to different categories after invoicing; footnotes are included in tables where such re-allocations have been identified.}
• _{Changes to business arrangements may affect figures. For example, several practices could merge or otherwise centralise funding and payments activities at a single practice while retaining their distinct identities for all other purposes. This could be a contributory factor to apparently anomalous figures but such practices cannot currently be identified within the available data.}
• _{Practices may provide a range of health care services, such as diabetic retinal screening, to the wider community and will therefore receive additional funding.}
• _{Some practices are flagged as having atypical characteristics which should be taken into consideration:}
  • _{For a small number of practices, payments in the reporting year were made only via ISFE so registered and weighted patient counts could not be found as this information is taken from NHAIS. Other practices may show no registered patients for a variety of reasons such as the practice has closed or is newly opened, it has an atypical business arrangement or is a walk in centre/walk in and out of hours centre. These practices are flagged as having no registered patients and average payments per registered and weighted patient could not be calculated. However, these practices' payments are included in the CCG, regional and national averages.}
  • _{Some practices experience large changes in registered and/or weighted patient counts throughout the year which can have an impact on the calculated average payments per patient. This is because the denominator used is the last known patient count and this figure may not be representative of the count of patients throughout the rest of the year upon which payments were based. These practices are flagged as having a large increase or decrease in patient numbers.}
  • _{Some practices opened or closed during the period. These practices are flagged as having a part year of data which should be borne in mind when making comparisons with other practices.}
• _{For more information please refer to the Data Quality Statement within the report.}