New interactive PCN reporting launched

Since April 2019, individual GP practices have been establishing and joining Primary Care Networks (PCNs), designed to enable collaboration between GP practices and other local primary health and social care services. To ensure that the data collected by the GP Patient Survey (GPPS) is accessible for these PCNs, a new interactive report has been launched on the survey website.

The report is designed to help local NHS services understand patient experience in their area, it demonstrates variation between practices within a PCN, and looks at comparisons with national results and change over time.

Insights from GPPS are one element of evidence when considering patients' experiences of general practice which can be used alongside other data to identify potential improvements and highlight best practice.

Getting started

The report is available on the GPPS website. It is easy to find results for your PCN by selecting its name from an alphabetical drop-down list, or using the search function.

Summary page

The summary page gives an overview of key questions for your PCN compared with the national results. It also gives information on the number of questionnaires issued and returned, alongside the response rate.

For example, this dashboard shows that Billericay PCN performs above the national result on overall experience of making an appointment (77% reported a good experience compared with 71% nationally) and overall experience of the GP practice (87% reported a good experience compared with 83% nationally). The dashboard also demonstrates that Billericay PCN results were slightly below the national result for ease of getting through to the GP practice by phone (65% found it easy compared with 68% nationally).

Survey section pages

For a more detailed understanding, you can access results for each question (using the contents page to help find specific areas or questions of interest).

For example, the ‘Overall experience’ section, displays results for patients’ overall experience of their GP practice. The chart at the top provides detailed results for the PCN in both 2020 and 2021, and includes a comparison with national findings.

• For Billericay PCN, findings have remained consistent over time (87% said good in both 2020 and 2021), and were higher than national results in both years.

The chart at the bottom of the page, ‘Practice result 2021’, shows variation for all practices within the PCN for the latest survey year.

• Within Billericay PCN, findings for overall experience of GP practice varied, results ranged from 79% to 94% of patients reporting a good experience across the six practices.

This variation can be used to identify examples of good practice within your PCN, or to look at practices that need further support in a particular area. However, it should be noted that all comparisons are indicative only, due to relatively smaller practice sample sizes.

Exporting and downloading

To help practices and PCNs use these results in their own work, for example to create charts in PowerPoint, it is possible to export the chart data to Excel or csv format. Snapshots of the charts visible on screen can also be downloaded as a pdf.

Feedback

We are always looking for ways to improve the data we share, so if you have any feedback about your experience of using the tool, please get in touch with the GP Patient Survey team at gppatientsurvey@ipsos.com.

More information

For more information and guidance about the PCN tool, visit the Guidance pages within the report.

For more information about GPPS, visit the ‘About’ page on the survey website.

For more information about PCNs, visit the ‘Primary care networks’ page on the NHS England website.