Practice Outcome Data

NHS England has published high level indicators about GP practice outcome data. The data is meant to give information about the quality that practices provide. NHS England would like to publish data about patient experience, patient outcomes and patient safety. The data comes from previously confidential data that practices and commissioning groups had access to. The data has been released because NHS England has a commitment to openness and transparency. Click here for a direct link to the information on NHS Choices website about Kings Medical Practice.

However there are some real issues with the data that has been published:
  • Some of the data is quite old e.g. the GP patient experience data comes from the 2011 GP Patient Survey
  • The data has no context about it e.g. there is data about the number of referrals to outpatients per 1000 population but no hints as to whether high referrals are good or bad
  • The data is presented in a random way e.g. the first screen you get is the whether patients would recommend the surgery, smoking status recorded in patients notes, people with risk factors offered smoking cessation advice and emergency admissions for ACS conditions! These are all quite random and don't appear to be linked
  • There is no GP patient safety data - and this is a core comment of NHS quality
 The data comes from the Primary Care Assurance Toolkit. The toolkit gives some context about the indicators in that it displays the practice data in relation to other practices and then gives a global assessment of the practice. On the Primary Care Assurance toolkit we are assessed as an 'achieving practice' but this information cannot be found anywhere on the data that NHS England has released.

I am a 'data junkie', I love comparative data and the practice has a large appetite for knowing how we are doing and how we are doing compared to our peers. We are keen to tell patients about our performance and have always had an easy and well signposted link to practice performance. The outcome information published by NHS England is OK but there is not enough context or comment for either myself or patients to make any meaningful judgement about what the published data means.

So, if I was assessing this new data I would say it was OK but could do a lot better!






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