Webinar - Unpacking the 2024 GP Patient Survey: Insights for Primary Care

The 2024 GP Patient Survey results were published on Thursday 11 July. This large-scale survey, commissioned by NHS England, provides unique insight on patient experience of primary care. The 2024 survey is the first in a new time series, with questions focusing on how primary care services are delivered as set out in the Recovery Plan. Results are reported at national, ICS, PCN and practice level.

If you are interested in understanding patient experience in primary care, watch a recording of the webinar where we provide a short introduction to the GP Patient Survey, looking at how the survey works, highlighting some key results from 2024 and explaining how to find the resources you need.

Attendees were invited to ask questions during the session, which we have answered below. You can find out more about the survey on our FAQ page.

Who is able to take part in the survey? Do patients need to have had a recent appointment? What can this tell us about patient experience?

Patients are eligible to take part in the survey if they are aged 16 or over and have been registered with an GP practice in England for at least 6 months. These patients do not need to have had an appointment recently. It is important to include them because this can tell us about barriers to access (why people could not contact their practice and what they did instead), and about other issues such as long-term health conditions. However, many people do report on recent experiences; 66% said they had tried to contact their practice and 51% had an appointment in the last 3 months.

How should practices interpret the question about choice of location, particularly practices who only have one site?

The questionnaire needs to be relevant to practices delivering their services in different ways. While many practices only operate from one site, some will work with other practices to offer appointments at a range of locations and others may offer home visits. As a result, in general, while patients who are registered at practices that only operate from one location would not be expected to give this answer, some may do so. This could be for a range of reasons but most likely will be related to perceptions, i.e., how patients understand that their practice operates.

Why do practices offering similar services (such as websites) get different results?

The survey asks about different methods used by patients to contact their GP practice, including via their practice website. All questions in the survey were tested with a range of patients to ensure they were clearly understood, even if patients had not or would not contact their practice in this way. It is possible that practices offering similar services will get different results. This may reflect different patient demographics, for example, with some groups more likely to use online methods to contact their practice, such as younger people or working populations. It may also reflect differences in awareness of these services among patients, as a result of communications by their practice.

Why is the number of patients who respond small compared with my practice list size?

The GP Patient Survey uses random probability sampling, the gold standard in survey research. By using a random sample, each patient has an equal chance of selection, allowing us to make inferences about the practice as a whole (or about particular patient groups). The random sampling uses the full list of patients registered with a GP, and means that a small number of people can be selected to represent all patients from a particular practice.

We aim for a minimum sample size for each practice and PCN (of 100 and 200 respectively). The number of patients we select to achieve this target is driven by the predicted response rate for a particular practice (based on the response rate in the previous year). The reason we do this is to get a statistical confidence interval – which ensures we have enough responses in each practice to be confident that the results are statistically significant.

Why do you report weighted data?

All published GP Patient Survey outputs present weighted results, with unweighted base sizes presented alongside these to provide transparency on the actual number of patients who answered a question. Weighting ensures results are better reflective of the population of adult patients aged 16+ who are registered with a GP (as not all patients are invited to take part and not all of those who are invited return a survey). Weighted data is useful for organisations where fewer patients of a certain group (for example, younger patients) have filled in the survey than we would expect. There is more information about the weighting on the survey website and in the technical report.

Do the patient experience pages on the website and practice download PowerPoint show results for all questions?

The patient experience pages on the website and practice download include a selection of questions from the full questionnaire, some are related to access and some to experience during the last appointment. These are designed to give people a quick overview of results, which can be filtered by demographics and used by patients to compare practices. The full results for all questions and all practices are available on the surveys and reports page, and will also be in the analysis tool which will be released in September.

How important is a high response rate?

Survey response rates in general have been decreasing over recent years, including on the GP Patient Survey. However, while response rates are an important measure of survey quality, they are not the only or most important measure. To ensure results are representative it is important to reduce non-response bias, to ensure that the people who do take part are similar to the population overall. We take a range of steps to improve responses from groups we know are less likely to take part (like younger people, those from ethnic minority backgrounds and living in deprived areas). For example, we offer GPPS in a range of accessible formats so that it is as inclusive as possible, and people are able to take part easily, including in 14 languages as well as English, British Sign Language, large print and Braille. You can read more about how we make the survey accessible on the website.

We also provide publicity materials for practices to use to promote the survey on the website. We would encourage practices to display these, in waiting rooms and on websites, to help encourage people who are invited to take part. We are always open to hearing feedback on how you think we can encourage more responses from the people selected to take part.