General Practice In-hours Activity Visualisation
As at 31 December 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 December 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 currently unavailable. 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, 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. PHS is working collaboratively with our partners to address these data recording issues.  PHS will use a future release to include comparisons showing any associated differences in recording (mapping) and will date back to January 2018.

Areas of possible inconsistent counts being returned have also been identified, this is currently being investigated as a matter of priority.

The data remains subject to change and monthly figures and comparisons should be used with caution.

An in-practice dashboard is also available to each practice 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.

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 26 March 2024.