Latest GP Patient Survey results
The latest GP Patient Survey (GPPS), which seeks the views of over two and a half million people every year about their experience of GP services and NHS dentistry, is published today.
The data included in this publication was collected in two waves during July to September 2014 and January to March 2015.
Dr. David Geddes, Head of Primary Care Commissioning for NHS England, said: “The GP Patient Survey provides invaluable feedback and insight on the services we provide. It is encouraging to see the vast majority of patients rate their experience of general practice as good but there are also areas where we can focus efforts to improve services across the country.
“We are working on ambitious plans, set out in the Five Year Forward View, to strengthen primary care including £350 million of investment in new schemes to improve access to general practice and improve premises and technology. We are also working with Health Education, The Royal College of General Practitioners and the British Medical Association’s GP Committee, to expand the primary care workforce and further benefit patients.”
4 comments
The data as presented is almost unusable.
I gave up trying to read the overcomplicated spreadsheet for CCG data as it was impossible to track across from my CCG -Southampton- to the percentage figures in the final few columns that I might have been interested in. I couldn’t get the practice data to load at all.
The intervening columns are in fact of little interest to anyone who is not preoccupied with analysing the reliability of the data sources; for the service provider looking at year to year or quarter to quarter figures this isn’t relevant provided any changes in data gathering are understood.
It would be more helpful for each CCG to have it’s own figures fed back, with a comparison against the national average, and ( if you want) against a cluster of comparable CCGs. In this simpler form the large number of irrelevant columns could be coped with.
For practices a summary of their own figures, and an average for England, and for their own CCG, would be fine. One could gild the lily by allowing access to data about other practices in the same CCG, anonymised or otherwise.
Please – no more vast impenetrable spreadsheets
Waiting time is reported on only as time in waiting room; this is a small and often unimportant part of total wait.
Waiting needs analysts in a more sophisticated manner
1 Wait for telephone advice
2 wait for appointment; if appointment needed
3 time in waiting room AFTER appointment time
Currently even the latter is not clearly reported
Having delved further into the survey results it would appear that only 19% of the people who answered the GP Patient Survey said that they did not find appointment times offered to them convenient. Of those 19%, 40% would have found a surgery open on a Sunday convenient.
In other words only just under 8% of the people who completed the GP Patient Survey would have found having a surgery open on a Sunday helpful. This raises the question is there any evidence of a sustainable need for seven day opening of GP surgeries.
I note that although the question is asked how many people would find an appointment on a Sunday the summary of the results does not say how many people said yes to this question. In view of the push for seven day opening I would have thought that this question would have been highlighted as supporting the argument. Unless as I suspect most people do not want a Sunday appointment.