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 May 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 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.

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

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 May 2024, the total level of activity in the GP practices which returned data was approximately 7.9 million encounters. This is 4.2% higher than the 12-month rolling average activity (June 23 to May 24).

The x axis is the date, starting January 2018 in annual increments to January 2024. The traces continue until May 2024. 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. All of the data are official statistics in development. 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. Undefined has less variability than and External Direct even less across the time period.

Close

In May 2024, 36.6% of encounters were classified as Direct (encounter between a patient and a clinician that can be face to face, telephone, video or eConsultation). The data suggests that 80.7% of these Direct encounters were physical appointments and 19.3% were virtual.

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

Dashboard Development

In this release unmapped job roles have now been mapped appropriately. This has had the effect of reducing the number of unmapped Health Care Professionals (HCP) encounters by 13% compared to last months publication.

A new tab has also been added to the data dashboard called "Tabular Data". This tab gives an additional breakdown of encounters by Encounter Class (the type of encounter/interaction between the patient and the HCP or practice staff. This can range from direct encounters to those where no contact with the patient is involved) and HCP group which can be filtered to show bespoke time periods.

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 27 August 2024.