General Practice in-hours activity visualisation
As at 31 August 2025

About this release

This monthly release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) is part of a joint project with NHS National Services Scotland (NHS NSS) and presents information about the number of ‘encounters’ recorded in the clinical systems of General Practices (GPs).

The data dashboard presents information on encounters recorded by the whole practice team (including administrative staff) and classifies these encounters into several categories. This publication summary focuses on encounters done by clinicians which have been classified as direct or indirect. Direct encounters involve some form of direct contact for clinical care between clinical staff and a patient e.g. face to face or telephone consultations. Indirect encounters include any activity not involving direct contact with patients e.g. reviewing prescriptions, clinical and non-clinical administration.

Data has been extracted from approximately 94% of practices across Scotland and is presented by NHS Board and Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP). This release covers the period January 2018 to August 2025.

Please note the previous release of this publication was cancelled due to data quality concerns about the July 2025 data. As such this release contains previously unpublished data for July and August 2025. The issue, which occurred in the data processing before PHS received the data, has been investigated and addressed.

Main points

Encounter rates per 1,000 registered patients presented in this release have been adjusted to take account of the variation in the number of working days in each month, with 21 working days being used to ensure a standardised approach.

The following points relate to the month of August 2025 and the data returned from 94% of Scotland's GP practices:

• The total number of encounters recorded by clinicians was approximately 4.4 million or 758 for every 1,000 patients who were registered with these practices. The rate per 1,000 registered patients increased by 1.2% compared to the previous month (July 2025) and increased by 4.6% compared to the same month in the previous year (August 2024).
• Approximately 2.4 million encounters recorded by clinicians were classified as direct (54.6%) which gives a rate of 414 encounters per 1,000 registered patients. The rate of direct encounters per 1,000 registered patients increased by 3.2% compared to the previous month (July 2025) and increased by 7.6% compared to the same month in the previous year (August 2024).
• Approximately 2 million (81.2%) direct encounters were recorded as physical (face to face) and 0.5 million (18.8%) were recorded as virtual (telephone or technology assisted).
• Since January 2018 there has been a steady increase in the number of indirect encounters recorded by clinicians. However, the number of direct encounters recorded by clinicians has remained fairly consistent over the course of the time series. There is however an increasing trend in the number of unmapped direct encounters which could not be assigned to a specific HCP group; where it was not clear what type of health care professional recorded the encounter.

The x axis is the date, starting January 2018 and continuing to August 2025. The y axis is the number of encounters per 1000 registered patients. There are four traces representing different groups: the direct clinicians group has the highest rate of all groups and has remained fairly constant over the timeseries, the indirect clinicians group has the next highest rate and this has steadily increased since 2018. The other two groups are the unmapped direct and indirect groups which have much lower rates however the unmapped direct group shows an increasing trend since 2018.

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Figure 1: Monthly Trend in Clinical Activity (12-month moving mean)

Note: Full definitions of the encounter class are available on the dashboard.

Data quality

Not all activity is recorded in the GP clinical systems and information on the complexity or duration of the activity is not currently available. Therefore, the activity reported does not represent all the work happening within General Practice. Additionally, improvements in the recording of information on GP clinical systems over time may affect some trends in activity.

The GP clinical systems used to record encounters have default entries embedded in them which may not be updated by clinicians to accurately reflect the type of encounter being undertaken. This is likely to impact the number of encounters being recorded as face to face and therefore inflate the number of encounters which are presented as "Physical" rather than "Virtual" in this publication.

The data remains subject to change and monthly figures and comparisons should be used with caution. For example, some of the monthly variation in activity figures for measures which are not described as "adjusted" will be caused by differing numbers of working days in each month.

Data contained within this release is not directly comparable to other publications on GP activity ongoing in NHS England or NHS Wales (NWIS), due to differences in methodology of counting and classifying GP activity.

Further information

Data presented in the visualisation are subject to change.

The next release of this publication will be 4 November 2025.