Primary Care Workforce Quarterly Update, 31 March 2024, Experimental Statistics

The figures presented in this publication are a snapshot of GPs, Nurses, Direct Patient Care (DPC) and administrative staff working in general practice at the end of the reporting period. Although NWRS collects data on a number of other attributes of the primary care workforce (e.g. age, gender, working hours) only FTE and further granularity on Job Roles are presented as part of this publication. Similarly, we will only report FTE data from the ARRS data, no other elements are used in calculations. Where data are presented net of baseline for the ‘collated’ DPC staff groups, users may notice some negative numbers. This happens where there has been a decrease in the reported FTE between the reporting period and the baseline date of March 2019.

All general practices are contractually required to provide data on their workforce. However, a small number of general practices do not do so or submit incomplete data. In addition, some records fail data validation and are excluded. The completeness and coverage of the collection has improved since September 2015 when only 88.1% of practices submitted data; this percentage is now around 99.6%.

The NWRS has inbuilt data validation functionality to reduce data entry errors such as limiting job roles to those within the Workforce Data set (NWD), checking the format of national insurance numbers or ensuring only numbers are entered for numeric fields.

As described in the Using this publication section, ARRS data is being used in this release as submission rates amongst PCNs is not as full as that of practices. As of March 2024, 98.4% of PCNs had submitted usable data to NWRS. As there is no set deadline for either PCNs to submit or for claims to be approved, ‘completeness’ of that data is not measurable.

Analysis of the NWRS PCN and General Practice data sources indicate there are a small number of duplicate records across the two, with some staff groups affected more than others. There are some inherent difficulties in accurately identifying all of these records and being definite about which records are in error. However, using fuzzy-matching techniques we estimate this to account for no more than 2% of the total DPC reported FTE.

The two distinct measures presented in this publication, as described in the Summary page, are designed to offer different snapshot views of the Primary Care workforce so we do not recommend direct comparisons between the two. ARRS data have been introduced to offer an enhanced view of the workforce and should not be considered a direct alternative to data sourced from the NWRS.

The relevance of NHS workforce data is maintained by reference to working groups who oversee both data and reporting standards. Major changes to both are subject to approval by the Data Alliance Partnership Board (DAPB) which replaced the Data Coordination Board in 2021.

Significant changes to workforce publications (e.g., frequency or methodology) are subject to consultation, in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics.

We release figures in Excel spreadsheets and CSV files. Tables include footnotes as necessary.

We publish figures as quickly as possible after extract and announce our publication schedule on our website at https://digital.nhs.uk/services/organisation-data-service/data-downloads/production-schedule.

From May 2022, data is published quarterly with DPC staff groups published on release, followed by General Practitioners approximately four weeks after as the data become available.

We ask practices to maintain their workforce data on an ongoing basis so that the information in NWRS is always complete and up-to-date. We extract the data automatically at midnight on the last working day of each month, which may fall on a weekend or public holiday.

Currently, practices do not need to actively submit figures, although it is anticipated that new NWRS functionality will be introduced that will enable practices to affirm the accuracy of their submitted data, or to confirm that where no updates have been made, there have been no changes to their workforce and no ad-hoc locums worked at the practice during the reporting period.

The data collection has been reviewed by NHS Digital's Burden Advice and Assessment Service (BAAS) process which is part of the assurance process that all organisations asking to collect health or adult social care data must complete.

All collections must be approved by the Data Alliance Partnership Board (DAPB) which is responsible for all governance arrangements for information standards, data collections and data extractions.

We apply NHS Digital’s data security and confidentiality policies when we produce our publications. Where necessary, we apply statistical disclosure control to maintain confidentiality.

This publication is of interest to a wide range of organisations and stakeholders to make local and national year-on-year comparisons.

This data is vital in addressing the current workforce pressures in primary care and securing a well-trained workforce for the future. Workforce Minimum Data Set (wMDS) publications are used to form an accurate picture of the current workforce to provide a clear understanding of current skills and capacity in primary care.

We welcome your comments and feedback via email to [email protected]