Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many practising GPs there were in England each year since 2015; and what the source of this information is.

The following table shows the number of full time equivalent (FTE) doctors in general practice from September 2015 to September 2022.

Source: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/general-and-personal-medical-services/28-february-2023

Notes

1. Data includes estimates for practices that did not provide fully valid staff records.
2. Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) refers to the proportion of full time contracted hours that the post holder is contracted to work. 1 would indicate they work a full set of hours (37.5), 0.5 that they worked half time. In GPs in Training Grade contracts 1 FTE = 40 hours and in this table these FTEs have been converted to the standard wMDS measure of 1 FTE = 37.5 hours for consistency.
3. Figures shown do not include staff working in Prisons, Army Bases, Educational Establishments, Specialist Care Centres including Drug Rehabilitation Centres, Walk-In Centres and other alternative settings outside of traditional general practice such as urgent treatment centres and minor injury units.
4. It is not recommended that comparisons be made between quarterly or monthly figures (e.g. Mar 16 to Sept 16) due to the unknown effect of seasonality on workforce numbers. As data in 2015 was only available for September, this month has been used to provide the FTE figure for each subsequent year.
5. Figures from the first three collections (September 2015, March 2016 and September 2016) should be treated with caution as the data submission rates from practices were appreciably lower than for subsequent reporting periods. This means that the reported figures for the early years of the collection may be lower than the true picture. In September 2015, which was the first extract from the new Workforce Minimum Data Set, only three of four Health Education England (HEE) regions submitted data. Consequently, September 2015 figures should be treated with additional caution.
6. From June 2018 onwards, the data source for GPs in Training Grade (foundation and specialty registrar trainees on placements in General Practice) changed to the HEE Trainee Information System (TIS). To ensure comparability across the national time series, data from both old and new sources was used to calculate estimates for previously uncounted GPs in Training Grade back to September 2015. Prior to TIS, the sources for the GP registrar data were the main General Practice Workforce data collection and an additional extract of medical trainees delivering primary care services who were paid through ESR. In GPs in Training Grade contracts 1 FTE = 40 hours, however to ensure consistency in this table these FTEs have been converted to the standard wMDS measure of 1 FTE = 37.5 hours.