General Practice In-hours Activity Visualisation
As at 31 January 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 January 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.

There has been a delay in publication this month due to additional quality checks on the data as undercounts in activity from December 2022 were identified (potentially due to ongoing GP server migration across Scotland).  This seems to have impacted counts since December.  The undercounting of data is now resolved, however, we are still investigating December 2022 data so it should be treated with caution.

We have also identified areas where blood tests results have been recorded as direct face‑to‑face activity rather than administration activity. We plan to reflect this change in extract methodology in the May 2023 publication and will include comparisons showing the differences in mapping going back to January 2018. 

Further information

The next release of this publication will be 25 April 2023.