The General Practice Workforce series of Official Statistics presents a snapshot of the primary care general practice workforce. A snapshot statistic relates to the situation at a specific date, which for these workforce statistics is now the last calendar day each month.
This monthly snapshot reflects the general practice workforce at 31 March 2023.
These statistics present full-time equivalent (FTE) and headcount figures by four staff groups, (GPs, Nurses, Direct Patient Care (DPC) and administrative staff), with breakdowns of individual job roles within these high-level groups.
For the purposes of NHS workforce statistics, we define full-time working to be 37.5 hours per week. Full-time equivalent is a standardised measure of the workload of an employed person. Using FTE, we can convert part-time and additional working hours into an equivalent number of full-time staff. For example, an individual working 37.5 hours would be classed as 1.0 FTE while a colleague working 30 hours would be 0.8 FTE.
The term “headcount” relates to distinct individuals, and as the same person may hold more than one role, care should be taken when interpreting headcount figures. Please refer to the Using this Publication section for information and guidance about the contents of this publication and how it can and cannot be used.
England-level time series figures for all job roles are available in the Excel bulletin tables back to September 2015 when this series of Official Statistics began. The Excel file also includes Sub-ICB Location-level FTE and headcount breakdowns for the current reporting period. CSVs containing practice-level summaries and Sub-ICB Location-level counts of individuals are also available. Please refer to the Publication content, analysis, and release schedule in the Using this publication section for more details of what’s available.
We are continually working to improve our publications to ensure their contents are as useful and relevant as possible for our users. We welcome feedback from all users to [email protected].
Key Facts
Full-Time Equivalent is a standardised measure of the workload of an employed person and allows for the total workforce workload to be expressed as the equivalent number of full-time staff. 1.0 FTE equates to full-time work of 37.5 hours per week, an FTE of 0.5 would equate to 18.75 hours per week.
See the Using This Publication page for a detailed explanation of how we calculate FTE figures.
FTE GPs - 1.2% (440) more than March 2022
Headcount 45,680 -
0.9% (400) more than March 2022
(All GP figures exclude ad-hoc locums)
FTE Fully qualified GPs (excludes GPs in Training Grade) - 1.7% (463) fewer than March 2022
Headcount - 36,525
1.5% (567) fewer than March 2022
(All GP figures exclude ad-hoc locums)
FTE Qualified permanent GPs (excludes GPs in Training Grade and Locums) - 1.4% (372) fewer than March 2022
Headcount 35,222 -
1.0% (352) fewer than March 2022
(All GP figures exclude ad-hoc locums)
FTE Nurses - 1.8% (295) more than March 2022
Headcount 23,371 -
0.1% (25) fewer than March 2022
FTE Direct patient care staff - 6.2% (941) more than March 2022
Headcount 22,093 -
3.6% (774) more than March 2022
FTE Admin / non-clinical staff - 2.8% (2,060) more than March 2022
Headcount 101,629 -
1.9% (1,875) more than March 2022