General Practice In-hours Activity Visualisation
As at 31 October 2024

About this release

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

Information is 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 December 2024. Encounters are classified as direct or indirect. 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.

Main points

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.

• In December 2024, the total number of General Practice encounters recorded by the whole practice team was approximately 7.3 million or 1,339 per 1,000 registered patients. The rate per 1,000 registered patients increased by 1.1% compared to the previous month (November 2024) and increased by 1.9% compared to the previous year (December 2023).
• In December 2024, approximately 2.6 million encounters (35.8%) were classified as Direct which gives a rate of 479 encounters per 1,000 registered patients. The rate of Direct encounters per 1,000 registered patients decreased by 3.3% compared to the previous month (November 2024) and decreased by 5.2% compared to the previous year (December 2023).
• Approximately 2.1 million (81.3%) of Direct encounters were recorded as physical (face to face) and 0.5 million (18.7%) were recorded as virtual (technology assisted).
• Over the first 3 months of the Winter period, October 2024 to December 2024, there were 8.5 million encounters classified as Direct. The rate of encounters per 1,000 registered patients has decreased by 4.3% so far this Winter compared to the Winter period October 2023 to March 2024, and decreased by 2.6% compared to the Winter period October 2018 to March 2019 before the Covid pandemic.

The x axis is the date, starting January 2018 in annual increments to January 2024. The traces continue until October 24. The y axis is the Monthly Activity (Count). 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. There is one vertical line: the line indicates March 2020 when the pandemic was declared and lockdown introduced. Both Indirect and Direct encounter classes of data activity counts fluctuate across the period with a similar pattern. Indirect has the greatest activity of all encounter classes, then Direct, Undefined and External Direct.

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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 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.

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.  Improvements in the recording of activity on GP clinical systems may also affect some trends when looking at activity over time.

New Developments

From February 2025:

A new adjusted rate of encounters per 1,000 registered patients has been added to the dashboard on multiple tabs. This new measure adjusts the existing encounter rate to take account of the variation in the number of working days in each month: ((Activity/Working days)* the average number of working days in a month, 21)/(population*1,000).

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  4 March 2025.