First things first!

1. All of the data we are using to drive the visualisations in this website are already available in the public domain
2. We are legally entitled under the Open Government Licence to reproduce the data in any way as long as we reference it. Read it here.
3. Whilst we have manipulated the data to be able to visualise it as a comparison we have not and will not alter the underlying data.
4. We have been driven to do this by the lack of transparency in the public arena.

The data we use and how we use it

Closest practices

The map displays all GP practice locations and branch surgeries in England which meet both of the following criteria.

1. Their postcode places them within 10 miles of the geographic centre of the selected postcode sector.
2. If there are more than 10 unique GP practices with 1 or more branch surgeries in the search then we limit the selection to the closest 10.

This means we’ll always be capped at 10 GP practices but may have more than 10 mapped locations if a GP practice has more than 1 branch surgery within the 10 mile search radius.

Because of the 10-mile radius cap, there will be some locations that have fewer than 10 GP practices represented on the map.

The GP practices identified from this process form the list of practices compared in all of the charts on the comparison tool.

So how do we work out the locations and their distances?

Firstly, we ask the user for their postcode sector. This is their full postcode without its last 2 letters.

The input box for this has a list of all English postcode sectors created from from the current ONS Postcode Directory (ONSPD) publication.

For GP practices and their branch surgeries we use the quarterly epraccur and ebranchs datasets from NHS Digital’s Organisation Data Service which includes the registered postcode of each GP practice and branch surgery.

Then using geographic co-ordinates given in ONSPD we calculate the approximate straight-line distances between the centre of the postcode sector and the GP Practices and branch surgeries before applying the criteria in 1 and 2 above.

Workforce statistics

The workforce statistics visual combines information from the monthly ‘Patients registered at a GP practice’ publication issued by NHS Digital with practice workforce data taken from NHS Digital’s ‘General Practice Workforce’ dataset which is also issued monthly.

We pull out the practice level data for total registered patients from the former and total GP FTEs (full time equivalent), the total nurse FTEs and locum FTEs from the latter of these 2 datasets.

Importantly this information is only available at GP practice level and cannot be sub-analysed by branch surgery. This is true for all the remaining data in the RightGP4.me tool.

The table shows total FTE and numbers and ratios based on this data.

Colour coding is applied to show the relative high and low of each of the ratios across the (up to) 10 GP practices in the table.

CQC Ratings

The Care Quality Commission ratings section contains data sourced from the CQC’s monthly ‘Care Quality With Ratings’ dataset available from the CQC website.

We have tabulated ‘Domain’ level data in one table and the ‘Population Group’ data separately.

Clicking on any of the icons in the table will take you straight to the most recent CQC report for that GP practice.

GP Patient Survey

We have selected 10 key questions from the GP Patient Survey and presented bar charts comparing the results for these questions across the 10 local GP practices identified above. Again this data is GP practice level and cannot be disaggregated to individual branch surgeries.

The source of the data is the GP Patient Survey website https://gp-patient.co.uk/SurveysAndReports and the data is published annually in July following a Jan-March survey period.

There are hundreds of questions on the survey, and we have selected the 10 indicators we feel are of most interest to the public, grouped around the themes of a) getting an appointment and b) the patient’s view on the quality of the appointment.

Managing Long Term Conditions

Each year, Public Health England publishes its ‘Practice Profiles’ dataset. The publication groups a set of indicators around 13 areas which broadly align with a set of long-term conditions.

Included in the dataset are a set of measures which show outcomes related to how well patients’ conditions are being managed or how diseases and their complications are being prevented (e.g. HbA1c measurement for patients with diabetes). Also included are Personalised Care Adjustment (PCA) indicators, which measure how well patients have engaged with primary care in managing their conditions.

We have taken each PCA indicator and each relevant condition management/prevention indicator and ranked each GP practice compared to the others in the list of 10.

We then add the ranks, polarised so that a high rank is a good outcome, and show these on the chart at the top of the comparison tool.

At the bottom of the tool the list of indicators can be filtered to just show those related to a user-selected set of long-term conditions.