Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many full time equivalent doctors have (a) entered and (b) left General Practice in England in each of the last three years.

The following table shows the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) qualified permanent general practitioners (GPs), excluding GPs in training grades and locums, who have left and joined practice in each year from from March 2019 to March 2022.

Notes:

1. Figures do not contain estimates for practices which did not provide fully valid records.
2. It is not recommended that comparisons be made between quarterly or monthly figures due to the unknown effect of seasonality on workforce numbers. Therefore, the latest comparable data available is March 2022.
3. 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 outside of traditional general practice such as urgent treatment centres and minor injury units.
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.
5. Data shows GPs who joined and/or left the cohort workforce between the beginning and end of each specified time period.
6. Due to data quality, a GP recorded as a leaver in these figures may have left one practice and joined another practice with poor data completion. In instances such as this, a GP will be incorrectly recorded as a leaver due to the identifying information no longer being present in the dataset. Conversely, a GP could appear in the practice cohort as a joiner but may have joined from a practice with poor data completion rather than being a new addition to the GP workforce.