NHS Jobs Adverts in General Practice, Q1 2022-23 to Q2 2025-26 [Management Information]

It is important to note that data within this release is on a secondary use basis, the data is taken from an administrative source which is not specifically designed for onward analysis.

When working with data we always look to minimise inaccuracies and the effect of either invalid or missing data. However, data quality depends on the values entered by users and we do not make any attempt to ask users to correct any data which we think may be erroneous. In a small number of cases we make corrections where it is clear that the values are incorrect. More information on where we do this can be found below and within the methodology section.

In assessing the quality and completeness of the data would like to make users aware of the following factors;

• General Practices are at liberty to use recruitment systems of their choice. NHS Jobs is free at the point of use, but we are not aware to what extent practices use other recruitment software or providers. We are aware anecdotally that practices may advertise to local markets or use trade media to advertise roles. As such, data should not be considered complete, nor have we made any attempt to quantify what level of advertising is used across alternative platforms.
• Data will only be made available at ICB and NHS England Region level. This step is taken to protect against any kind of analysis or judgements about individual practices and roles they may, or may not have advertised for. Some practices commission other organisations to submit job adverts on their behalf, leading to a small number of cases where we cannot accurately match the advert to the individual practice.
• Not all practices feature in the source data before it is aggregated to ICB and NHS England Region. Although we have not directly mapped practices to existing lists used in other publications, cross-referencing to these lists indicates that approximately a quarter of all practices list a position on NHS Jobs each quarter
• Some of the data fields populated by employers are free-text fields. This can lead to uncertainty around some values and is why they are not included in this analysis. This is particularly relevant for Job Title, which we have not included in the release.
• Advertised FTE is also a free text field, in cases where we suspect weekly hours have been used instead of FTE, we have recoded these values to FTE values based on the following formula

=IF (FTE value >2, FTE Value / 37.5, FTE Value)

i.e. If the FTE value is greater than 2, divide that value by 37.5 (the standard NHS working week) to provide an FTE figure, otherwise the original FTE value has been used.

As an example, using the above formula a role advertised as 37.5 FTE would be recoded to 1 FTE. A role advertised as 3 FTE would be recoded 0.08 FTE assuming the role being advertised was to work 3 hours per week. A role advertised as 2 FTE would be recoded to 2 FTE assuming that 2 x 1.0 FTE roles were being advertised. We would welcome feedback on whether this re-calculation of FTE values is pragmatic. A cut off of 2 FTE is used on the assumption that Practices (unlike larger NHS Trusts) are unlikely to advertise for larger numbers of roles in a single advert.

• Data relate only to general practices. We have mapped practices to ODS coding which indicates a prescribing general practice. This has removed primary care settings such as Optometry, Dentistry, and Community Health services from the data. In assuring an accurate list of practices to base the data on we have employed techniques similar to those in our Primary Care Workforce publications, this includes removing a small number of practices where organisation details indicate they are not a general practice despite being labelled as such in the raw data.
• Data do not relate to staff employed by Primary Care Networks (PCNs).
• Users are advised against describing these data as ‘Vacancies’ in General Practices. Within published secondary care data, this term relates to a clear definition solely for the purposes of that publication, and the 'Vacancy rates' in that publication are not taken from the NHS Jobs data source. Calculation of vacancy rates requires an understanding of the level of employment an organisation is funded to receive (often referred to as Establishment), a model not in use in General Practice.
• The data consist of only Fixed-Term and Permanent roles, contract types such as Bank and Temporary have been removed from the data. Users should note these only form a negligible amount (<1%) of the total dataset.
• We do not hold details of advertised wages or salaries associated with the job adverts.
• Every advert has been analysed in an attempt to understand if it has been placed for a role for a General Practitioner (GP). As such, we have labelled all roles within the Source Data table as either "GP" or "Non-GP".
• When creating a listing within the NHS Jobs system, users have freedom to allocate individual roles to any of the existing staff groups. In analysis of the raw data to identify General Practitioners we uncovered instances where there appeared to be clear mismatches between the role being advertised and the staff group it had been allocated to. Due to the lack of Job Role identifiers in the data, we have been unable to quantify the full extent to which this is happening across all Staff Groups. Users should bear this in mind when analysing data by staff group.

Data are classed as Management Information as they represent a new release of information which has been collected in the normal course of business. They may be incomplete in places and may not be quality assured to the same extent as other official statistics. They may not therefore be fully representative, which we have described above.