General Practice In-hours Activity Visualisation
As at 30 April 2025

About this release

This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS), as part of a joint project with NHS National Services Scotland, presents General Practice (GP) activity data extracted from approximately 94% of practices across Scotland by NHS Board and Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP).

This publication is updated monthly and has been running since October 2022.

Statistics are provided on the number of encounters which were recorded each month by the General Practice team, both clinical and non-clinical, in the period January 2018 to April 2025. Encounters are classified into several categories. Direct encounters involve some form of direct contact for clinical care between clinical staff and a patient e.g. face to face or telephone consultations. Indirect encounters include any activity not involving direct contact with patients e.g. reviewing prescriptions, clinical and non-clinical administration. External Direct encounters are assumed to involve some form of direct contact for clinical care between clinical staff who are external to the practice, and a patient or third party.

Please note the rates per 1,000 registered patients presented in this document have been adjusted to take account of the variation in the number of working days in each month, with 21 working days being used to standardise against.

Main points

• In April 2025, the total number of General Practice encounters recorded by the whole practice team including admin staff was approximately 7.8 million or 1,357 for every 1,000 patients who were registered with these practices. The rate per 1,000 registered patients decreased by 2% compared to the previous month (March 2025) and increased by 8.5% compared to the same month in the previous year (April 2024).
• In April 2025, approximately 2.9 million encounters (37.7%) were classified as Direct which gives a rate of 512 encounters per 1,000 registered patients. The rate of Direct encounters per 1,000 registered patients increased by 2.9% compared to the previous month (March 2025) and increased by 11.5% compared to the previous year (April 2024).
• Approximately 2.5 million (83%) of Direct encounters were recorded as Physical (face to face) and 0.5 million (17%) were recorded as Virtual (technology assisted).
• Since January 2018 there has been a steady increase in the number of Indirect encounters recorded in GP practices. The number of Direct encounters recorded has varied over the timeseries but in recent months has been similar to the number of encounters recorded at the beginning of 2018.

The x axis is the date, starting January 2018 in annual increments to April 2025. The y axis is the number of encounters per 1000 registered patients. There are four traces representing different encounter classes: a magenta trace which shows External Direct activity, a light purple trace which shows Indirect activity, a purple trace which shows Direct activity and a grey trace which shows Undefined activity. Indirect has the greatest activity of all encounter classes, then Direct, Undefined and External Direct. Across the timeseries Indirect activity increases whilst the Direct activity broadly stays at a similar level.

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Figure 1: Monthly Trend (12-month moving mean) by Encounter Class

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

Data Quality

Not all activity is recorded in the GP 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. Improvements in the recording of activity on GP clinical systems may also affect some trends when looking at activity over time.

The GP clinical systems used to record encounters have default entries embedded in them which may not be updated by clinicians to accurately reflect the type of encounter being undertaken. This will have the effect of inflating the number of encounters being recorded as a surgery consultation and therefore inflate the number of encounters which are presented as a "Physical" rather than "Virtual" in this publication.

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. Some of the monthly variation in activity figures will be caused by differing numbers of working days in each month, in the non-adjusted rates and figures.

Further information

Data presented in the visualisation are subject to change.

The next release of this publication will be 1 July 2025.