Publication, Part of Submissions via Online Consultation Systems in General Practice
Submissions via Online Consultation Systems in General Practice, April 2024
Official statistics in development
Methodological Change
From the April 2024 release of this publication a change in the methodology has been implemented which will result in changes to historic data:
- Changes to identifying practices known to have an Online Consultation System. We now identify practices with a system using the installation date provided by the suppliers. Where no date is provided for a practice we assume they have had a system prior to April 2023 and so are counted from April 2023 onwards.
- Changes to how we process data from suppliers. We now take the latest submission from each supplier. In some instances this may result in data for a practice not being included for a month resulting in a reduction in the number of submissions.
25 April 2024 09:30 AM
August 2023 data
Due to an incorrect submission for August 2023, the total number of submissions has reduced by 11%. This will impact any time series analysis and should be appropriately caveated for any onward use. This impact is spread across 26% of practices with some being more impacted than others.
25 April 2024 09:30 AM
December 2023 - January 2024 data
Due to inconsistent data submissions, data for practices using eConsult as their system supplier is incomplete for December 2023 and January 2024.
25 April 2024 09:30 AM
Summary
This publication provides information about the number of clinical or administrative submissions that general practices receive from their patients via Online Consultation Systems. This information is published monthly and provides a time series from April 2023 onwards including practice-level data about system availability and usage.
Data is included for the following measures:
• Practices: The total count of practices along with the number of practices known to have an Online Consultation System and the number of practices that received one or more patient requests/submissions via their Online Consultation System
• Count of registered patients
• The total submissions received via Online Consultation Systems, broken down into clinical, administrative or other/unknown submission type
• The rate of submissions per 1,000 patients registered with practices known to have an Online Consultation System
This data reflects demand for general practice services, both clinical and administrative, that is received from patients via Online Consultation Systems. It is not a measure of all requests received by practices which may also be received in other ways, for example in person, by telephone call and does not reflect the totality of demand faced by general practice.
The suppliers of Online Consultation Systems provide the data for this publication on behalf of the practices that they serve, and which have agreed to participate in the collection. Some system suppliers are not yet able to provide data for this collection.
System suppliers are able to supply retrospective data and updates, which means that data in this release is a snapshot at the time of publication. The time series and monthly practice-level figures may be subject to change in future releases.
No patient identifiable or patient-clinical information is collected or available in this release.
Key Facts
Practices with Online Consultation Systems
In April 2024, 5,400 practices were known to have at least one Online Consultation System.
Number of Patient Submissions
Practices received 3.2 million patient submissions in April 2024.
Submissions per 1,000 Registered Patients
In April 2024, participating practices received 65.42 submissions per 1,000 registered patients.
Resources
Last edited: 6 June 2024 9:40 am