How GPScore works

The short version

We take official figures about every GP surgery in England, mostly from the NHS's own survey of patients. For each figure we work out where the surgery sits compared with every other surgery. Those positions are combined into two halves, getting an appointment and quality of care, and the two halves are averaged.

The result is the GPScore. A score of 72 means the surgery does better than 72% of GP surgeries in England. Each score also gets a letter grade:

Getting an appointment

Half of the score. The weight shows how much each measure counts.

What we measure	Where it comes from	Weight
Patients find it easy to get through by phone	GP Patient Survey	30
Patients find it easy to contact the surgery through its website	GP Patient Survey	10
Patients had a good experience of contacting the surgery	GP Patient Survey	30
Patients felt the wait for their last appointment was about right	GP Patient Survey	30
Share of appointments given the same day or within a week	NHS England appointment figures, when loaded	25
Patients per full-time GP (fewer is better)	NHS England workforce figures, when loaded	15

Quality of care

The other half of the score.

What we measure	Where it comes from	Weight
Patients say their overall experience of the surgery is good	GP Patient Survey	30
Patients say their needs were met at their last appointment	GP Patient Survey	15
Patients say the doctor or nurse was good at listening	GP Patient Survey	10
Patients had confidence and trust in the doctor or nurse	GP Patient Survey	10
The inspectors' overall rating (Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement or Inadequate)	Care Quality Commission	15
How much of the NHS quality target the surgery met	Quality and Outcomes Framework	5
Routine care done well: cervical screening, blood pressure checks, diabetes care, asthma and lung disease reviews	Quality and Outcomes Framework	10
Children's vaccinations given on time	NHS England	5

If a measure is missing for a surgery, for example a new surgery that has not been inspected yet, we leave it out and spread its weight across the other measures. No surgery is marked down for a gap in the data. The two NHS England monthly datasets are loaded whenever a copy is available. When they are not, the appointment half is based on the survey alone for every surgery, so every surgery is measured the same way.

How reliable is it?

The GP Patient Survey gets around 100 replies per surgery. That is enough to tell an excellent surgery from a poor one, but not enough to separate two surgeries that are a few points apart. So we:

• give no score to a surgery with fewer than 30 replies;
• mark each score as based on a small (30 to 49), medium (50 to 99) or large (100 or more) number of replies;
• show the survey's own margin of error next to every percentage on the surgery page;
• leave surgeries with fewer than 50 replies out of the national rankings.

The survey figures are the official results published by Ipsos for NHS England. We do not adjust them.

What the score is not

It does not measure how well patients recover, safety problems or individual doctors. It is not adjusted for poverty: surgeries in poorer areas tend to get lower survey results for reasons that are only partly within their control, so we show how deprived each surgery's area is and let you judge. A low score sums up what patients said and what inspectors found. If your surgery has a low score, it is still worth seeing a doctor when you need one.

Area averages

The figures for a town, council area, NHS area or constituency are the average of its surgeries, with survey results weighted by the number of replies. An area is only ranked when it has at least three scored surgeries.

When it updates

The GP Patient Survey comes out every July and that is when scores are recalculated. Inspection ratings update monthly. Details from the NHS website, such as opening times and whether a surgery is taking on patients, are checked about once a month. The data sources page shows what is loaded and when.