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 the end of August 2024 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 in 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.

The data remains subject to change and monthly figures and comparisons should be used with caution. Please note some of the monthly variation in activity figures will be caused by differing numbers of working days in each month. Improvements in the recording of activity on GP clinical systems may also affect some trends when looking at activity over time.

An in-practice dashboard is also available for practices 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.

Main points

• In August 2024, the total number of General Practice encounters recorded by the whole practice team was approximately 7.6 million. This is a decrease of 171,145 encounters (2.2%) compared to July 2024 and a decrease of 417,700 encounters (5.2%) compared to August 2023.

The x axis is the date, starting January 2018 in annual increments to January 2024. The traces continue until August 24. The y axis is the Monthly Activity (Count). 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. There is one vertical line: the line indicates March 2020 when the pandemic was declared and lockdown introduced. Both Indirect and Direct encounter classes of data activity counts fluctuate across the period with a similar pattern. Indirect has the greatest activity of all encounter classes, then Direct, Undefined and External Direct.

Close

• In August 2024, 2.8 million encounters (36.9%) were classified as Direct (an encounter between a patient and a clinician that can be face to face, telephone, video or eConsultation). This is an increase of 40,692 encounters (1.5%) compared to July 2024 and a decrease of 317,149 encounters (10.2%) compared to August 2023. Approximately 2.3 million (83.4%) of Direct encounters were recorded as physical and 0.5 million (16.6%) were recorded as virtual.
• Over the Summer period April 2024 to August 2024 there were 13.8 million encounters classified as Direct. This figure is 5.1% lower than the number of Direct encounters recorded over the Summer period April 2023 to August 2023, and 0.6% higher than the number of Direct encounters recorded over the Summer period April 2019 to August 2019 before the Covid pandemic.
• Approximately 94% of GP practices in Scotland are included in the data. However, month to month there can be some variation in which practices return data.

Note: Full definitions of the encounter class are available on the dashboard.

Publication user survey

We have created a survey to find out what our users think of the General Practice In-Hours Activity Visualisation. We want to find out what people find useful and what improvements they think could be made.

It should take less than 5 minutes to complete the survey.

If you have any questions about it or wish to contact the team, please email phs.generalpractice@phs.scot. 

Latest developments

A new "Triage" encounter group has been added to the publication this month. These encounters relate to patients being directed to the most appropriate member of the general practice team or other service. Previously most of these encounters were included in the "Telephone Consultation" encounter group.

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 5 November 2024.