Changes to the GP Patient Survey
1. Questionnaire changes
Minor changes were made to the questionnaire in 2023 to ensure that it continued to reflect how primary care services are delivered and how patients experience them. The changes were all cognitively tested with patients.
The following changes were made (trend data remains for these questions):
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Q9 “When did you last try to make a general practice appointment with a GP, nurse or other healthcare professional, either for yourself or for someone else?”
| 2022 question wording | 2023 question wording |
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Q9. When did you last try to make a general practice appointment, either for yourself or for someone else? This could be in person, on the phone, by video call or online messaging, and with a GP, nurse or other healthcare professional.
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Q9. When did you last try to make a general practice appointment with a GP, nurse or other healthcare professional, either for yourself or for someone else? This could be for an appointment in person, on the phone, by video call, by messaging online or by text message.
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Q15 “On this occasion, were you offered any of the following choices of appointment?”
| 2022 question wording | 2023 question wording |
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Q15. On this occasion, were you offered any of the following choices of appointment? Please put an x in all the boxes that apply.
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Q15. On this occasion, were you offered any of the following choices of appointment? Please put an x in all the boxes that apply.
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Q22 “When was your last general practice appointment?”
| 2022 question wording | 2023 question wording |
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Q22. When was your last general practice appointment? Please include appointments with different healthcare professionals, at different locations, as well as telephone and online appointments.
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Q22. When was your last general practice appointment? Please include appointments with different healthcare professionals, at different locations, whether in person, on the phone, by video call, by messaging online or by text message.
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Q38 “Do any of these conditions or illnesses reduce your ability to carry out your day-to-day activities?”
| 2022 question wording | 2023 question wording |
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Q38. Do any of these conditions reduce your ability to carry out your day-to-day activities?
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Q38. Do any of these conditions or illnesses reduce your ability to carry out your day-to-day activities?
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Additionally, the routing following Q37 (“Would you describe yourself as having ‘long COVID’, that is, you are still experiencing symptoms more than 12 weeks after you first had COVID-19, that are not explained by something else?”) was split over two lines, to make it easier to follow.
Some changes have resulted in the loss of trends. The addition or removal of response options for the questions below has affected the comparability of the latest results with previous years, even though question wording remains the same or similar. This is because it would be difficult to determine whether a difference in results is caused by the change to the questionnaire or a 'real' difference in attitudes or behaviours.
The following changes were made (trend data is not available for these questions):
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Q3 “Which of the following general practice online services have you used in the past 12 months?”
| 2022 question wording | 2023 question wording |
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Q3. Which of the following general practice online services have you used in the past 12 months? By ‘online’ we mean on a website or smartphone app.
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Q3. Which of the following general practice online services have you used in the past 12 months? By ‘online’ we mean on a website or smartphone app.
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Q12 “How did you try to book the appointment?”
| 2022 question wording | 2023 question wording |
|---|---|
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Q12. How did you try to book the appointment? Please put an X in all the boxes that apply.
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Q12. How did you try to book the appointment? Please put an X in all the boxes that apply.
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Q19 “What type of appointment did you get? I got an appointment…”
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Q23 “What type of appointment was your last general practice appointment? An
appointment…”
| 2022 question wording | 2023 question wording |
|---|---|
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Q19. What type of appointment did you get? Q23. What type of appointment was your last general practice appointment? Please choose one option only.
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Q19. What type of appointment did you get? Q23. What type of appointment was your last general practice appointment? Please choose one option only.
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2. Methodology changes
Sampling strategy
The 2023 survey used the same sampling approach as the 2022 survey.
Mailing strategy
The 2023 survey used the same methodology as the 2022 survey.
However, Ipsos and NHS England have also trialled several experiments on a sub-sample of survey respondents this year. These experiments tested methods for moving more respondents online (using a sequential push-to-web approach), as well as how to improve data quality and save costs.
More details of these experiments, and copies of the updated materials used for 2023 fieldwork, can be found in the 2023 technical annex.
3. Reporting
Excel reports and csv files
The format of the Excel reports has changed for the 2023 results. There will be three Excel reports published for 2023 and these will present the weighted percentage results (the proportion of patients selecting an answer) alongside the unweighted base (the unweighted base is the actual number of patients responding to a question). It is recommended that weighted percentage results are used as they have been adjusted to improve the representativeness of the results. These changes have been made to simplify the presentation of results.
If weighted bases and weighted response counts are required for any question these are contained in the published weighted csv files. Unweighted results in csv files will not be available on publication day, please email GPPatientSurvey@ipsos.com for access if required.
Suppression
Suppression is used to prevent individuals and their responses being identifiable in the data, and to ensure results based on very small numbers of respondents are not released.
The suppression methods for the 2023 survey have been updated to include the NHS Information Standards Board Anonymisation Standard, which fell within NHS England’s remit during the amalgamation of organisations that took place over 2022 and 2023. The GP Patient Survey now uses two types of suppression:
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In cases where a result is based on fewer than 10 people (unweighted), the result has been suppressed. For example, where fewer than 10 people answered a question from a particular organisation, the results are not shown for that question for that organisation. This method was applied in previous years, however it used both the weighted and unweighted base. It now just uses the unweighted base.
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In addition, for organisations with an eligible population of 1,000 or less, individual response option counts below 5 (but excluding 0), and corresponding percentages, have been suppressed for the relevant questions in the 'Some questions about you' section and questions relating to long-term conditions, disabilities, or illnesses. In instances, where only one response option is suppressed for these questions, the next lowest response option has also been suppressed to prevent back calculation of the primary suppressed result. The Technical Annex contains the full list of questions where this applies.
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‘Population’ for the GP Patient Survey is defined as the number of patients on the GP registered list for that organisation.
4. Organisational changes
Organisational changes reference changes to NHS organisational structures as well as detailing known changes in GP practice alignment to ICSs (as of April of each year). Published data is presented under the organisation name that was current as of the end of fieldwork, April 2023.
Practice level ICS changes
GP practice information is taken from the NHS Digital Organisation Data Service “epraccur” reference file. In cases where practices have closed before the implementation of higher geography changes, the file can map practices to organisations (e.g. regions and ICSs) that no longer exist. Where this is the case, the ICS and region for these practices is updated to reflect the current NHS commissioning structures, as of April in the respective survey year.
This year there were no changes for practice to ICS alignment based on ICS level boundary changes. However, one practice in the 2023 survey is being aligned with a different ICS compared with previous surveys:
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Y00213 has moved from QUA (Black Country ICS) to QHL (Live Healthy Happy Birmingham and Solihull).
The change outlined above reflects more accurate ICS mapping for this practice based on the practice postcode. Please note that due to the very small number of patients who responded at this practice, there is no meaningful impact on historical ICS level results.