Presentation by Scottish Government primary care services officers: FOI release

Information requested

(i) Any presentation by Scottish Government primary care services officers to Scottish NHS board chief executives providing detailed information on the provision of general practice services by NHS health board within Scotland, containing activity data e.g. patients seen by types of staff.

(ii) Information in the presentation by individual board.

Response

This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested.

I attach a copy of most of the information you requested.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested, specifically data by NHS Board. However, you may wish to contact Public Health Scotland (PHS) who may be able to help you.

The following information is included for context as part of my response and is being provided outwith the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA).

Notes regarding the data contained within the presentation:
The dashboard demonstrated in this presentation was released to NHS Board Chief Executives and Health and Social Care Partnerships Chief Officers on 12 September 2022. As part of ongoing continuous improvement work the data contained within this presentation which was produced on 12 July 2022 will have been updated within the dashboard released on 12 September 2022. PHS are currently working towards a consistent and scheduled publication of these data.

It should be noted that the data provided in the presentation are experimental and exploratory and are considered management information only. Management information is not the same as official statistics, which are required to adhere to the Code of Practice for Statistics, to ensure trustworthiness, quality and value. Management information is often aggregated directly from day-to-day administrative data sources, without the same rigour as official statistics.

The in-hours general practice (GP) activity project is a collaboration between National Services Scotland (NSS), Public Health Scotland (PHS) and Scottish Government (SG) to access, understand and improve the availability and consistency of activity data from in-hours general practice. The aim of the National data in the presentation is to demonstrate progress so far, including the type of analyses possible.

The data presented are based on numbers of “encounters*” as recorded in the practice clinical systems. There is known inconsistencies in these data due to recording behaviour which varies across and within practices, as well as differences in the way in which clinical systems generate encounters as part of their routine processing.

Note that these data do not reflect all activity carried out in a practice – only that recorded as encounters and nor do they take account of how long the encounter lasts.

The project team at NSS and PHS have worked with several GPs to understand and classify the encounters and the healthcare professional role (HCP) into meaningful groups for analysis. This is a work in progress as the team are continually refining the mappings to improve consistency within and between practices and NHS boards.

*An encounter is an interaction between a patient and a health care professional that is recorded on the patient record.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI 202200318599 - Information Released - Annex

File type

8 page PDF

File size

1.0 MB