General Practitioners: Finance

(asked on 13th November 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what was the real-terms, per-patient GP funding in (1) Cornwall, (2) the South West NHS region, (3) England, and (4) London in each year since 2000.


Answered by
Lord Markham Portrait
Lord Markham
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 18th December 2023

Spending on general practice (GP) services rose by just over a fifth in real terms between 2017/18 and the most recent data in 2021/22. More specifically it rose from £11.3 billion in 2017/18 to £13.5 billion in 2021/22, representing a 19% increase in real terms.

Payments to general practices are published by NHS Digital. The attached tables show the requested real-terms, per-patient GP funding figures from from 2014/15, which is the first year for which cilinical commissioning group summary figures are available; there is no data prior to 2013/14.

The tables summarise payments to GPs both in cash terms and adjusted for inflation. From 2020/21, payments are also made for primary care network-related activities. The final annual figures for inflation have been adjusted using the GDP deflator published by HM Treasury.

The figures attached are presented for payments per registered patient, as well as payments per weighted patient, where the weighting adjusts for differences in workload associated with age/sex, additional health needs, care home residents, list turnover, as well as areas costs and costs related to rurality. The figures include dispensing doctors related payments and the number of dispensing doctors in each area will therefore impact payment figures.

We have reported the health geography most closely fitting the request, with data availability changing over the years; for example, the data for 2022/23 is available at integrated care board (ICB) level but not at a sub-ICB level, while previous years’ data is available for NHS Kernow Clinical Commissioning Group.

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