General Practitioners: Bexley
(asked on 2nd April 2019) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the average waiting time for patients to see their GP in Bexley has been for (a) non-emergency appointments and (b) emergency appointments in the last twelve months.
Bexley Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) currently only captures data from four of its 23 general practices due to interoperability issues with one of the clinical system suppliers. However, national roll out of a new system to share this data is expected this month, meaning the relevant data for the remaining practices in Bexley should be available from May 2019.
The time between booking an appointment with a general practice and having the appointment, in days, for the practices where data is currently collected in Bexley CCG is presented in the attached table for the last available published date which was February 2019. A 12 month average from March 2018 - February 2019 has also been presented along with a comparison to the average across all appointments in England. NHS Digital’s ‘Appointments in General Practice’ data is published monthly with a two-month time lag.
The appointments data does not differentiate between emergency and routine appointments in general practice and the ‘time from booking to appointment’ does not take into consideration that many patients will be appropriately booking ahead as part of the continuity of care they receive for long-term conditions.
| Bexley | England | Bexley | England |
| February 2019 | March 2018 to February 2019 | ||
Same Day | 35.8% | 42.3% | 38.1% | 42.2% |
1 Day | 6.2% | 6.8% | 6.8% | 6.8% |
2 to 7 Days | 20.6% | 19.8% | 22.9% | 20.1% |
8 to 14 Days | 20.1% | 14.4% | 17.2% | 13.8% |
15 to 21 Days | 8.5% | 7.6% | 7.4% | 7.4% |
22 to 28 Days | 5.8% | 5.1% | 4.7% | 5.0% |
More than 28 Days | 2.9% | 4.0% | 3.0% | 4.7% |
Total | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
The time between booking an appointment with a general practice and having the appointment, in days, for all data available in Bexley CCG is presented above for the last published month February 2019 and as a 12 month average from March 2018 - February 2019 along with a comparison to the average across all appointments in England.
Notes:
- Data has only been able to be captured from up to four out of the 23 GP practices in Bexley due to interoperability issues with one of the clinical system suppliers.
- NHS Digital currently only publish data from Egton Medical Information Systems (EMIS) and The Phoenix Partnership (TPP) practice systems but are working with other general practitioner (GP) systems to bring them on board in future developments.
- There are several factors that drive the time from a booking to an appointment. This includes appointment availability at the practice, patient availability, the urgency of the appointment and GP advice.
- The data does not differentiate between emergency and routine appointments in general practice.
- The data does not include any information about the patients or clinical information.
- The data in the response includes appointments with all healthcare professional types, including GPs and other practice staff.
- Not all practices in England are included in the appointments in general practice publication, meaning the total number of appointments is not known.
- Same day and next day bookings are of particular interest so are presented here separately. Further bookings are presented grouped by weeks.
- The number of appointments that have already happened is provided as recorded in participating EMIS and TPP practices in England. The data presented only contains information which was captured on the GP practice systems. This limits the activity reported on and does not represent all work happening within a primary care setting.