Primary Care
Lead: John Battersby
The vast majority of NHS patient encounters occur in primary care healthcare settings. Data collected during those encounters sit in thousands of separate GP practice systems around the country. There is enormous potential for these data to provide more information about the health of the population.
Ideally we will one day be able to routinely link primary and secondary care data at record level as this will greatly increase our understanding of population health. Until then we have to use the various data sources that are currently available. Details of how to access them are shown on this page.
The new National General Practice Profiles are now available. The profiles, which have been produced by the Public Health Observatories in England, include updated data for the indicators that were included in 2010, together with additional indicators including:
- Estimates of the ethnicity of practice populations
- Estimates of life expectancy, fertility rates and low birth weight rates at practice level
The profiles also offer improved functionality, including:
- Comparison of a practice with: host PCT, host CCG, deprivation decile and peer group
- Production of scatter plots
- A symbol to indicate significant changes from 2010 to 2011
We are keen to hear what you think of the profiles and how you are using them. Please complete the User survey via the link at the top of the profiles or email us at feedback
The profiles contain practice level data from a number of sources. Almost all the source data, along with a number of additional indicators, can be found on the new Indicator Portal which is provided by the NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care.
Clinical Commissioning Groups
There are currently around 40 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in the East of England. The configuration of CCGs has been included in the 2011 National Practice Profiles and so a practice can be easily compared with its host CCG. For this reason the new profiles no longer have the clustering function that was in the 2010 profiles. However, Erpho has created an East of England GP Practice to CCG lookup. Until the configuration of CCGs stabilises it is something of a challenge to keep the list up to date. Please let us know of changes by emailing feedback
Erpho has also created full set of maps depicting the CCGs in the East of England these can be found under Clinical Commissioning Group maps
 | Data sources |
Although published in 2005, the report below still gives a good overview of primary care data sources:
 | A user's guide to data collected in primary care in England.
Published: Sep 05
Author: Shamini Gnani and Azeem Majeed
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The most important primary care data that are publicly available include:
These are also now available from the NHS Information Centre's Indicator Portal
Prevalence of Chronic diseases by age and sex
The Health Improvement Network (THIN) database has been combined with the QOF readcode definitions for chronic diseases to provide prevalence information by age and sex. Two further breakdowns are provided:
- By region - Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland as well as SHAs within England
- By IMD - 2007 IMD scores for England registered patients
See our visualisations of the prevalence data
By region
By age
Chronic Disease Prevalence Models
The public health observatories in England have generated models of estimated prevalence of a number of the common chronic diseases. The models can be found here. Erpho is updating the prevalence models as part of the 2011-12 work programme and they will be published as part of the 2011 National Practice Profiles on 7th December 2011.
 | Links |
If you have any comments about the content of this topic page or have any resources that you would like to be considered for inclusion, please contact our Primary Care lead, John Battersby.