NEW REPORT: How does patient satisfaction with general practice vary in England? And what do patients value in their practice?
We find that patients prefer:
- More GP partners
- More GP appts
- More F2F appts
- Smaller list sizes
Other findings👇
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/performance-tracker-local/general-practice-england
We find that patients prefer:
- More GP partners
- More GP appts
- More F2F appts
- Smaller list sizes
Other findings👇
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/performance-tracker-local/general-practice-england
Comments
There was a steady decline in satisfaction between 2012 and 2020, then a sharp drop during the pandemic
We'll get into some of the potential reasons for that drop later
The South West has always had the highest satisfaction and London the lowest
The gap between areas with the highest and lowest satisfaction has also grown since 2012
In 2012, fewer than 1 in 200 practices (0.4%) had satisfaction under 60%. In 2023, that had risen to more than 1 in 6 practices (17.9%)
Let's start with staffing
The most consistent finding in this report is that patients are more satisfied in GP practices that have more GPs per patient
From that we can see that an additional GP partner in a practice is associated with the largest increase in patient satisfaction (1.4 percentage points), then salaried GPs (0.9 p.p.), then GP trainees (0.3 p.p.)
But additional direct patient care (DPC e.g. physios, pharmacists, care coordinators etc) have no impact on patient satisfaction