In order to help you meet your GPAD obligations, and improve reporting in the practice, staff ‘profession’ needs to be recorded consistently. This note explains the process, context and wider benefits.
English Practices have recently been asked to provide appointment data via their CCGs to NHS England. As you will know, we believe that a flexible triaged approach supports practices to utilise their time to best effect for themselves and their patients. This view appears to be reflected in NHS England’s guidance on ‘total triage’.
We remain in discussion with NHS England, because we feel that you are being asked to report data that may not accurately reflect the activities carried out in the practice. In addition, we have made some changes to resolve the immediate issue, which is to minimise the administrative burden for you in completing the reports.
To enable a report to be produced, consistent descriptions of ‘profession’ are needed to meet the GPAD requirements. Pragmatically, this means that all staff professions need to match one of the exact descriptions recognised by NHS England. The new ‘Professional Group’ list allows you to select the best match for each staff member. This is accessed via Staff > Edit, or Settings > My Profile. There is a short note available: https://askmygp.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360006981297
Although this work is in response to GPAD, there are some more general benefits. By using consistent descriptions of profession, we will be able to provide you with better reporting in relation to staff groups – for instance allowing capacity planning by profession, or better understanding the activity of groups within the practice.
As always, the quality of any reports produced are dependent on the quality of the input data. Obvious limitations of reports from askmyGP, besides data quality include:
- any activity not recorded via askmyGP will not be included e.g. Nursing or Clinic activity booked directly.
- We cannot report on data (such as profession) which has not been entered into the system.
- GPAD guidance permits some contacts to be counted twice. We will try to ensure that we include this, however it may not capture a small percentage of this double activity contact.
We will add a report to your system in the near future. Should you wish us to provide reports directly to your CCG please contact us via your Training Partner to discuss details.
