News

GP Patient Survey 2011-12

Aggregated data for July to September 2011 & January to March 2012.

The Department, together with Ipsos MORI, has published the latest Official Statistics from the GP Patient Survey. The survey provides information on patients’ overall experience of Primary Care services and their overall experience of accessing these services. The latest results are aggregated from two waves of patient responses collected in July to September 2011 and January to March 2012.

Key points from the 2011-12 GP Patient Survey are:

  • Overall response rate was 38% with over 1 million responses across two waves.
  • 88 per cent of patients rate their overall experience with their GP practice as good.
  • 79 per cent of patients rate their experience of making an appointment as good.
  • 81 per cent of patients are satisfied with their surgery opening hours.
  • 90 per cent of patients with a long-term health condition rate their overall experience of their GP surgery as good.
  • 93 per cent of patients with a long term condition feel confident to manage their own condition.

The published data is available at National, PCT and GP practice level on the GP Patient Survey website results pages.

A number of changes were made to the GP patient survey methodology and questionnaire for 2011-12. As a consequence of these changes, no results from 2011-2012 can be compared to previous years, even where questions remain the same. In addition to new questions, and a change in the frequency of mailings from quarterly to twice a year, there have been a number of refinements to the weighting scheme. Weighting is standard practice in surveys of this nature and is required in order to ensure that findings are representative of the wider population, and not just those who respond to the survey. Results from previous years GP patients survey are available in the archive section of the GP Patient Survey website results pages.

GP Patient Survey Pre-release 2011-12 (PDF,21K)