Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an estimate of the number of full time equivalent GPs working in England in each of the last three years.

The following table shows the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) doctors in general practice in England in each of the last three years.

Notes:

1. 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 equals 40 hours. The FTEs have been converted to the standard measure of 1 FTE = 37.5 hours for consistency.
2. 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.
3. Data includes estimates for practices which did not provide fully valid staff records.
4. Full Estimation: Estimates are made for both headcount and FTE for those practices which did not provide any valid data for one or more of the four staff groups (or in the case of practices providing no valid Direct Patient Care (DPC) data, DPC estimates are made for those practices also failing to provide valid data for at least one other staff group). The absence of data for a staff group could be due to poor data quality or no submitted data. For these practices, clinical commissioning group-level estimations are made.
5. Partial Estimation: In some cases, practices provide valid records about their staff but do not include information about their working hours. In these cases, we retain the record and calculate estimates for their working hours and full-time equivalence based upon the national averages for the job role. These figures are referred to as ‘partial estimates’, and the scale of these estimates varies by staff group.