General Practice In-hours Activity Visualisation
As at 30 April 2023

About this release

This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) presents General Practice (GP) activity data extracted from participating practices across NHS Scotland from January 2018 to April 2023 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 on the 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 a primary care setting.

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

We have identified areas where blood tests results have been recorded as direct face-to-face activity rather than administration activity. We planned to reflect this change in extract methodology in the June 2023 publication and include comparisons showing the differences in mapping going back to January 2018. This has been delayed due to technical issues.

We have also identified areas of possible inconsistent counts being returned which is being investigated as a priority.

The data remains experimental and subject to change and monthly figures and comparisons should be used with caution. For example, March 2023 activity levels for direct GP encounters have been refreshed following last month’s publication and subsequently risen from 1.69 million to 1.8 million.

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 25 July 2023.