About this release

This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) presents General Practice (GP) activity data extracted from approximately 94% of practices across NHS Scotland from January 2018 to the end of September 2024 by NHS board and Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP).

This exploratory work aims to illustrate the type of activity information captured within GP clinical systems. Not all activity is recorded in the clinical systems and information on the complexity or duration of the activity is currently unavailable. Therefore, the activity reported does not represent all the work happening within general practice.

Please note the data contained within this release is not directly comparable to other publications on GP activity ongoing in NHS England, or NHS Wales (NWIS), due to differences in methodology of counting and classifying GP activity.

The data remains subject to change and monthly figures and comparisons should be used with caution. Please note some of the monthly variation in activity figures will be caused by differing numbers of working days in each month. Improvements in the recording of activity on GP clinical systems may also affect some trends when looking at activity over time.

An in-practice dashboard is also available for practices to allow them to view their activity data down to individual staff member and undertake quality work; guidance documents have also been developed and issued to encourage more uniform recording practice. Engagement with practices is ongoing to investigate and solve data anomalies. Data quality indicators are being developed to allow better understanding of the data.

Main points

  • In September 2024, the total number of General Practice encounters recorded by the whole practice team was approximately 7.3 million. This is a decrease of 230,957 encounters (3%) compared to August 2024 and an increase of 108,176 encounters (1.5%) compared to September 2023.
  • In September 2024, 2.7 million encounters (37.3%) were classified as Direct (an encounter between a patient and a clinician that can be face to face, by telephone, video or eConsultation). This is a decrease of 53,279 encounters (1.9%) compared to August 2024 and a decrease of 53,994 encounters (1.9%) compared to September 2023. Approximately 2.2 million (83.7%) of Direct encounters were recorded as physical and 0.4 million (16.3%) were recorded as virtual.
  • Over the period April 2024 to September 2024 there were 16.5 million encounters classified as Direct. This figure is 4.6% lower than the number of Direct encounters recorded over the period April 2023 to September 2023, and 0.8% higher than the number of Direct encounters recorded over the period April 2019 to September 2019 before the Covid pandemic.
  • Approximately 94% of GP practices in Scotland are included in the data. However, month to month there can be some variation in which practices return data.

Note: Full definitions of the encounter class are available on the dashboard.

Further information

Data presented in the visualisation are subject to change.

Where it is identified data are excluded from that months release due to technical issues, these data will be updated the following month.

The next release of this publication will be 3 December 2024.

General enquiries

If you have an enquiry relating to this publication, please contact David Redpath at phs.generalpractice@phs.scot.

Media enquiries

If you have a media enquiry relating to this publication, please contact the Communications and Engagement team.

Requesting other formats and reporting issues

If you require publications or documents in other formats, please email phs.otherformats@phs.scot.

To report any issues with a publication, please email phs.generalpublications@phs.scot.

Older versions of this publication

Versions of this publication released before 16 March 2020 may be found on the Data and Intelligence, Health Protection Scotland or Improving Health websites.

Last updated: 04 November 2024
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