As part of an investigation into GP surgery sizes in Birmingham I’ve collected some initial data on GP sizes from Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust.
The data was gathered through submitting an FOI request after direct approaches took too long.
The response to the FOI request with a link to the spreadsheet is available here.
It gives patient numbers for GP surgeries as of the end of June: these vary wildly from over 37,000 at the biggest surgery to a few hundred at the smallest.
Sadly the key information – how many GPs are employed at each surgery to respond to those patients – was not supplied. The accompanying email did mention 367 GPs on the medical performers list, which averages out at 4.7 per surgery – but it’s also not clear how many of those are employed full time or, indeed, practising at all.
I am now waiting for the remainder of the data requested.
UPDATE: I’ve just discovered a PDF with GP practice data for the whole of England on the Prescription Pricing Division’s FOI disclosure pages. Seems that may have been a better avenue than individual PCTs. Now, to extract that data from the PDF…
In the meantime, here’s a quick visualisation of the data using Google Fusion Tables. Those in the top quartile of surgeries based on patient numbers have a large red marker; those in the third quartile (above average) have a large yellow marker. Those in the second quartile (below average) have a small green dot; and those in the bottom quartile have a small blue dot. It doesn’t really tell you anything other than where to look, and that possibly there are more large surgeries in the north than the south.