GP Appointment Data Released
The GP appointment data came out yesterday - https://lnkd.in/euPACMSt .Others have linked to it already but I thought I’d have a look at it and see if it was useful in anyway.
My overnight conclusion is I’m not sure it’s really added anything. Perhaps it might put to bed the myth that GPs are not seeing anyone - 71.3% of all appointments in October were face to face. 38.9% of all appointments took place on the day they were booked. Over 30 million appointments took place.
It hasn’t captured who wanted an appointment but couldn’t get one? It hasn’t captured whether any harm came to anyone who didn’t get an appointment. It hasn’t captured whether any of the Aroles Staff have helped. It hasn’t captured how easy it is or otherwise to get through. Perhaps these measures are coming.
The data doesn’t show what people are presenting with? who else could have dealt with it? did it need to be seen? did they come back? did they go to A&E?
It hasn’t shown any of the metric around who is being seen. I heard yesterday that one ICB has done an analysis that 650 patients were responsible for 54000 GP appointments in a year (some appropriate some not..) do we need to be looking at frequent fliers more?
I’ve looked at some local data at a practice level - yes there is some variation - but again its really hard to read anything meaningful into it - one practice with low figures - is probably just coding things wrong.. we really need a better way of coding things… one practice does a total triage like system and deals with many more people on the phone - they got quite good satisfaction scores and perhaps their pts like that way of doing things? Perhaps this needs to be linked to the GP survey data?
Speaking to local practices - no one is actively trying to shirk work - all are busy - all would like more staff - all would like less paperwork - and less dumping on from other parts of the NHS does this help?
Everyone talks about big data - how is this going to help?