General Practice In-hours Activity Visualisation
As at 31 March 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 March 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 May 2023 publication and include comparisons showing the differences in mapping going back to January 2018. This has been delayed to the June 2023 publication.

Further information

The next release of this publication will be 27 June 2023.

The GP in-hours pilot report covers the work of the GP In-Hours Activity Data project team (Scottish Government, NHS National Services Scotland, and Public Health Scotland) who engaged with a group of GP practices to pilot new recording guidance for patient encounters and the use of an in-practice dashboard. The pilot was a necessary precursor to a national rollout of the these products to ensure the validity of the approach and content being shared. The guidance will also support data quality of the National In-hours General Practice Activity Visualisation.