Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many GPs have been contracted to the NHS in each of the last 20 years for which figures are available.
The number of full-time equivalent (FTE) doctors working in general practice in England in each year since September 2015 presented in the following table. Data is not included prior to 2015 as improvements were made to the methodology for recording all staff working in general practice and data prior to this is not comparable.
FTE |
|
| |||
September 2015 | September 2016 | September 2017 | September 2018 | September 2019 | |
All general practitioners (GPs) | 34,429 | 35,229 | 34,653 | 34,534 | 34,862 |
Source: NHS Digital
Notes:
1. Data as at 30 September 2019.
2. Figures shown do not include GPs working in prisons, army bases, educational establishments, specialist care centres including drug rehabilitation centres, walk-in centres and other alternative settings.
3. Each period, figures contain estimates, for practices that did not provide fully valid General Medical Practice GP records.
4. 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 Registrars' contracts 1 FTE = 40 hours. To ensure consistency, these FTEs have been converted to the standard wMDS measure of 1 FTE = 37.5 hours in the table.