General Practice in-hours activity visualisation
As at 31 May 2025

About this release

This monthly release by Public Health Scotland (PHS), is part of a joint project with NHS National Services Scotland (NHS NSS), and presents information about the number of ‘encounters’ recorded in the clinical systems of General Practices (GPs). Data has been extracted from approximately 94% of practices across Scotland and is presented by NHS Board and Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP). This release covers the period January 2018 to May 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.

Rates per 1,000 registered patients presented in this release 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 ensure a standardised approach.

Current developments

This release includes newly available data on encounters where people Did Not Attend (DNA) their appointment or scheduled interaction with a Health Care Professional (HCP).

Where a DNA has been recorded against an encounter, it has been removed from the total number of encounters. This will represent a slight undercount of DNAs, as some DNAs will have been recorded on the system as administrative notes, not linked to encounters. In some cases, a patient having not attended an appointment will be recorded by administrative staff rather than the HCP with whom the appointment was scheduled. The DNA tab on the dashboard contains an estimate of the number of these instances.

Main points

• In May 2025, the total number of General Practice encounters recorded by the whole practice team (including administrative staff) was approximately 8.1 million or 1,460 for every 1,000 patients who were registered with these practices. The rate per 1,000 registered patients increased by 7.5% compared to the previous month (April 2025) and increased by 6.9% compared to the same month in the previous year (May 2024).
• In May 2025, approximately 2.9 million encounters (35.7%) were classified as Direct which gives a rate of 521 encounters per 1,000 registered patients. The rate of Direct encounters per 1,000 registered patients increased by 9.3% compared to the previous month (April 2025) and increased by 8.8% compared to the previous year (May 2024).
• Approximately 2.4 million (83.2%) Direct encounters were recorded as Physical (face to face) and 0.5 million (16.8%) were recorded as Virtual (telephone or 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 increasing compared to the number of encounters recorded at the beginning of 2018.

A graph showing the trend of GP activity by encounter class over time. The x axis is the date, starting January 2018 in annual increments to May 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 increases at a lower 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 not currently available. Therefore, the activity reported does not represent all the work happening within General Practice. Additionally, where improvements in the recording of activity on GP clinical systems have occurred, this 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 may impact on the number encounters being recorded as a face to face direct 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.

This release has removed encounters where double counting of activity in EMIS practices had been found. This resulted in a new trend for the whole time series.

We are currently investigating a potential issue in activity levels for NHS Fife.

Further information

Data presented in the visualisation are subject to change.

The next release of this publication will be 5 August 2025.